QUESTION :
I was sharing my screen in Zoom from a PC. I have a KVM switch that lets me switch between my mac and my PC. But when I switched the display to my mac’s screen, the shared image on Zoom wasn’t updated. The game was clearly still running, because the we could hear the music, but the image was stuck on what it looked like when I switched the display.
Is there some way I can “Trick” my pc into thinking there’s a scfreen connected?
ANSWER :
There is no “trick” possible.
The way the display works is that when a program writes on the display,
Windows will actually store the modifications in a memory buffer that
it will send to the monitor dozens of times per second.
The program doesn’t know about this buffer. It thinks that it’s issuing
Windows commands (API) to the monitor.
Zoom on its side will access this memory buffer repeatedly, to broadcast
it as video to the recipients.
When the KVM has taken the monitor away, this chain of events falls apart.
The API commands that the program is issuing will fail and the memory
buffer is no longer updated.
The result is that the screen is frozen.
The only real solution is to get a second monitor, for each computer
to have its own.