wireless-display

Use your laptop as a second monitor for your Windows desktop PC over WiFi.

Usage

You need a virtual display driver on the host machine to make this work. On Windows, you can use Virtual-Display-Driver. I don't know a solution for other operating systems yet.

Important: Make sure both machines have ffmpeg installed and it's in your PATH. Also set FFMPEG_DIR environment variable to the directory containing ffmpeg include files.

Install the program from cargo:

cargo install wireless-display

On the PC you are currently using, start server with hardware acceleration enabled:

wireless-display server --hwaccel

On the PC you want to use as second monitor, start client with hardware acceleration enabled:

wireless-display client --hwaccel

See wireless-display server --help and wireless-display client --help for more options.

Make sure both machines are on the same network.

Why create this?

My desk can only fit one desktop monitor, but I always need more screen space for development. I have a laptop so I thought why not use it as a second screen. I found some other solutions online, but they are either paid, less configurable, or overly complicated. So I decided to build my own.

WebRTC in combination with ffmpeg seemed to be good solution for this. But it's very complicated to set up. I had to use a little of help from AI to get it working. The result is still not perfect, but it's good enough for my use case.

Useful links

ffmpeg build instructions