[HELP!]Back-to-Back Monitors and VLC

[buxtahuda]

So, we've just set up a second monitor on a system at work to display certain advertisements and information to customers. That means the monitor is not visible to me while at the station, and although it's easy to manage playing a full-screen video on it I need full functionality and control without moving all the equipment around.

At the moment I'm playing with VLC to attempt a stream of the secondary display to the primary display; I'm not doing so well as I can only make the primary display get captured. I don't want to have to use a RD s/w and go to an entirely other computer (although that's an option I'm putting in place) just to manipulate what's being shown on the secondary display.

I wouldn't particularly mind a dedicated s/w just to get the needed preview, but so far I haven't found a single solution that actually works. (found an old program called extdesk, but it's the opposite of what I need and didn't work)

I appreciate any help ahead of time, and look forward to gaining some knowledge regarding this type of situation.


*EDIT:


Now that I think about it, my computer tech teacher years ago used to monitor all our different machines with her one, with I guess a VNC. This would be similar to what I'm wanting, only I need it for multiple monitors on one local machine as opposed to multiple machines.

 

[jmacavali]

So I understand this as:
1. You have 2 monitors hooked up to your computer.
2. One of them you use and one of them faces away from you towards the customers.
3. As the 2nd monitor sits now, you can't see it from behind your keyboard/mouse.
4. You want to be able to change and edit things on the 2nd monitor and want to be able to view it on the first monitor.

I doubt there is a program that has this feature as most of the time if there are multiple displays connected to a PC then the user is looking at them both.

Perhaps hooking up a simple Craigslist used PC/keyboard/mouse combo would be the quickest/easiest solution?

 

[buxtahuda]

So I understand this as:
1. You have 2 monitors hooked up to your computer.
2. One of them you use and one of them faces away from you towards the customers.
3. As the 2nd monitor sits now, you can't see it from behind your keyboard/mouse.
4. You want to be able to change and edit things on the 2nd monitor and want to be able to view it on the first monitor.

I doubt there is a program that has this feature as most of the time if there are multiple displays connected to a PC then the user is looking at them both.

Perhaps hooking up a simple Craigslist used PC/keyboard/mouse combo would be the quickest/easiest solution?

Thank you for the response!

That is exactly correct. Similar to how Windows 7 gives you window previews, I'd like a small view of the entire second display to be kept on the first display.

I could easily keep a live stream of the primary screen on the secondary using VLC player, and had hoped I could achieve it the other way around. I'm soon going to try running a VNC server on the computer and just running the client on the same machine, but I had hoped a less resource-intensive approach could be found.


*EDIT:


Extra hardware is certainly not a viable option in our small space, and that would be giving full capabilities to who views the screen. Really that should be the more taxing and last route.

This whole setup was derived to keep from dedicating a screen and DVD player to the small space we have and so that we could do practically anything with the extra screen real estate.

Guess I may need to keep studying JAVA and just write a simple app that will let me format different quadrants of the app on the second screen from the first to display different videos and images.

 

[jmacavali]

Well.........I guess all I got left is.......best of luck to you.