I want to watch movies stored on my Windows 10 desktop PC using an HDMI cable instead of buying something like Chromecast, so I bought a 12’ HDMI cable (plugged into motherboard’s HDMI output).
I am now able to mirror my desktop onto my TV.
But I would like to be able to watch movies from my desktop without mirroring, so that someone would be able to use the desktop PC while another person is watching a movie on the TV and of course not see what the other sees on the desktop’s monitor. Also, mirroring entails changing the sound profile from PC to TV every time one wants to switch over.
At my girlfriend’s house, we use a Chromecast and use a Chrome browser plugin on her Mac called Videostream to watch movies stored on the Mac on the TV.
If there’s a similar program or plugin for use with an HDMI cable instead of Chromecast? I need a solution like that, or I guess I’m going to have to buy a Chromecast.
I use an HDMI cable as well. You want to set your desktop’s display settings to “Extend desktop to this display” instead of “Duplicate desktop on 1 and 2”. I do this all the time, and will SDMB while my wife watches a Netflix chick flick / horse movie, for example.
Like MP4’s? I use Windows Media Player to play mine, and I just drag that app onto the TV half of my desktop and they work just fine. You could also use VLC for free.
It’s possible you’re storing / playing videos from a source that uses HDCP. In that case, you’ll have to make sure that your TV and your HDMI cable, and probably the video card on your PC are all HDCP compliant. It’s a real PITA. This article gives a good summary and suggests trying a cheap HDMI splitter.
Essentially, the TV becomes your laptop’s second monitor. If you go to your desktop, right-click, and choose Display Settings, you can see where display 2 (your TV) is relative to your laptop screen. Drag the movie player window towards that window and you should see it appear on that other screen.
You see this in the business world all the time. The laptop video out (VGA, and nowadays HDMI or DisplayPort) is connected to a projector. The person presenting can run the slideshow or video "full screen"on the projector (no window frames) and meanwhile can display notes and other resources on the laptop’s screen just for themselves to read. Essentially the same as you want to do…
The relative locations the computer thinks it has do not need to match the physical relative locations. When I use the second monitor to display static files (such as a reference document while working on a report in the primary monitor), my second monitor is physically to the left but I drag windows to the right to push them there (I find that movement easier than to the left). Other times I have music videos running in a monitor that’s behind and above my laptop; the laptop thinks the monitor is to the right.
But it will always be either to the right or to the left as far as the computer knows.
(To be clear, you can drag the different monitors around relative to each other in Display Settings. They can be to the left, right, up, down, diagonal, or any random position, really…)