I have a weird idea for a feature request.
I have a USB 4k USB-C capture card that I use for capturing footage off the Windows 10 VM, it’s also handy for making sure the nVidia card thinks there’s a monitor attached.
When I need to install updates or changing something in safemode (when the looking glass service isn’t running) I find myself using lookingglass to capture my mouse and keyboard while using cheese or OBS as a monitor for the VM.
I was wondering if it would be possible for you or someone else to add a feature to the looking glass client to use the video from my capturecard directly as a failover for when the VM is still booting or when the service has failed to launch.
I’ve had this idea for a while now, but I wanted to wait till looking glass was at a somewhat stable state before I started asking for some weird feature that most people wouldn’t even use. I know latency would be huge with a usb capture device, but it’s good enough for just changing some settings to getting the VM running again.
It’s an interesting idea however it’s no simple task as it’s wrought with the issues that would come with implementing the V4L feed. Something I will keep in the back of my mind for later experimentation but tbh not likely something that would be added.
OK, thanks for considering it.
This is a super low priority thing that’s for sure so I wouldn’t mind if it never gets added, but it would have some potential uses if it does gets added.
Some PCIe capture cards have less than 1 frame of latency so with that this workaround could act as a excellent method of controlling VMs running weird OSes that don’t support the LookingGlass service (MacOS-X, Windows 98, SteamOS, Android, etc…). There’s other things that could be integrated too, like HDMI audio passthrough for example, this idea opens up quite a few possibilities for the future.
But again I agree this is not a high priority thing and might not even be worth implementing considering the additional requirements/dependencies that a V4L2 implementation would need. Whatever you decide with this is ok with me and I thank you for your work on this project. I use it every day
Just had another idea about this, and figured it’d be better to resurrect this post than to make another topic since it’s basically the same as before. So instead of integrating a V4l stack or using pipewire to pipe in video or whatever, how about a more simple way of implementing this?
Would it be possible to add a setting to make the looking glass client window transparent when it’s connection to the video service is lost? Like instead of the purple screen that shows up now.
If this were added, I could just have a maximized video capture feed behind the looking glass client window, and BAM! “Seamless” integration!