How to mirror Retropie from my Pi to my laptop

BGallagherLA

Hey all.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to add a camera/audio feed to my Twitch streams, and one possible solution I've found is to mirror my Pi/Retropie feed to my PC. OBS needs to have the game you're streaming being played on the same computer where your camera feed is coming from, and the most common way around it is to buy a capture card... but I'm hoping to do so without spending that kind of money haha.

Anyway, I found this article that shows how to set it up https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/projects/how-to-connect-a-raspberry-pi-to-a-laptop-display - and it seems pretty straightforward though I still can't get it to work. I'm running a Pi 4 with RetroPie 4.6 and I'm not sure why this wouldn't work. Anyone have any ideas/suggestions?

mitu

I think VNC needs a desktop environment to mirror - RetroPie runs outside of a desktop environment (doesn't need X.org to work).

BGallagherLA

@mitu Hmm, OK, that makes sense why it wouldn't work then. Are you familiar with any way I could send my RetroPie feed to my laptop? If I ran another HDMI from that second port on the Pi to my laptop would I be able to see the Pi feed on the laptop somehow? I'd prefer not to spend the money on a capture card... but it seems that might be the only way, sadly.

Clyde

This thread from 2018 discussed a couple of options to stream your Pi's picture to another system, but I don't know how much of it is still viable. As you can see there, I tried to do it myself, but I eventually gave up, because it was either not working or too slow on my Pi 3B. Maybe the latter will be better on a Pi 4.

I also tried a external capture card for around 80€, but although it worked, it added somewhat of half a second of delay, which made most games not pleasant to play.

The reason I wanted to stream the picture rather than just use an hdmi splitter was that my 16:9 / 720p video projector doesn't like the native solution of the 4:3 / 1600x1200 monitor in my arcade cabinet. So I had to convert it somehow, and streaming was one possible way to do that.

Finally, I found a working solution in an external hdmi-to-vga converter, since my projector only has the aforementioned problems only with digital video signals. Luckily, there's no discernable difference in the quality of the analog vga picture, maybe because I spanned the hdmi cable most of the way and plugged the vga converter directly into the projector (it's only the size of a cable's connector without the cable).

Just some experiences that may show you a viable way for your setup.