How to use a laptop with a HDMI to usb capture card as a Raspberry Pi screen?

Last Updated on October 19, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

We where not able yet to reproduce this video instruction:

  • Eventually due to a faulty connectors.
  • So we connected to hdmi usb capture card shown in the example video above with OBS studio as in this example with a thin client:
  • This is easy and only requires to plug the HDMI cable from the thin client into to HDMI output of our Raspberry Pi 4 and it works at the first attempt.
  • Also here rebooting worked fine, and after the reboot we could see the Pi screen on the display of our laptop.
  • After a while, we can also see stripes on our laptop screen caused to the screen saver.
  • We know now that our HDMI to usb capture card works fine and is not the cause that we cannot reproduce the above instruction.
  • To use a HDMI usb capture card with a Pi and an Android phone would be great to have a Pi with an Android phone as a screen which has an excellent power management.

This is not the case for Raspberry Pi screens as we have shown here:

  • but if we manage to use and Android phone as a Pi screen, we can for instance run a Pi 4 with 3 x 20 000 mAh battery for more than 24 hrs.
  • If this works we can use a Pi 4 with this setup as an alternative for our Pinephone if our office application tests with the Pinephone shown here should fail:

And is a Pi 4 not better as a platform for a mobile physiological data acquisition system as a Pinephone? We are almost there to have these device ready to compare those for mobile office as well as for physiology.