I used to have a “dumb” TV and a 10m long HDMI cable running from my PC to the TV which allowed me to pick it as a source. Then on Windows 10 I’d just duplicate my screen and tada, I could watch anything on my TV – and control my PC with a wireless mouse and keyboard I’d keep close to the TV.

Except now I switched to a smart TV, and my hdmi cable is not recognized. I tried everything, and I think it’s because it’s an old 1.x cable and the TV, understandably, needs a 2.0 or more recent. Doesn’t help that sellers don’t seem to indicate which version their cables are. Of those that I could find, a cable of such length starts at 100$ (2.1 version) and there’s no way I’m dropping that much, it’s a third of the price of the TV itself lol.

And then I got to thinking, this is 2021 and both my PC and TV are connected to high-speed wifi… do I really need a cable? But alas, my TV only supports chromecast (as if I want to transit through google) and it doesn’t really solve my problem. Chromecast just streams something to your TV. If I send it a youtube video, it will open the youtube app which has ads (as ublock on firefox blocks all youtube ads).

I’m also trying screenmirroring.app and it works, but again I can’t control the PC from the TV monitor – not like the screen projection works on Windows (think of it as having two monitors like pro-gamers, except the second monitor is a TV somewhere else in the room). The big drawback however is it doesn’t support sound, and I would like to play sound from my TV. Again, something that is pretty much window’s native feature to set up a second screen is what I would really want. without dropping 200$ on a cable lol

With that said I have to admit I’m completely behind on casting technologies and have no idea what’s available today. It doesn’t have to be a second monitor, right? It just has to work like one.

Thank you very much to anyone who can help me out 🙏

  • @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOP
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    22 years ago

    Edit: I found that VLC, which I’d installed on my TV, has a wireless feature. VLC keeps amazing me lol. You connect to your user account using your credentials, and it lets you browse C:\ (unfortunately only that drive as far as I can tell). I put my downloads folder in my favourites and yes, it works. It has some latency with sound if you scrub through the video but it works super well.

    With that said I still prefer a keyboard and mouse to a remote, but this is a solution if I can’t find anything else. I also still need a way to get youtube on my TV without going through the app, as even Blokada (you can install v3 on your TV from the website) does not stop all youtube ads, but it stops most of them. It’s also a bit unwieldy to find the video I was looking at on my PC (using a terrible keyboard on tv), and scrub to the point I stopped watching it. Especially cumbersome if it’s a 4 hour stream I have to comb through lol.

    Hope I was able to help other people that may have been wondering about the same thing too.