I'm a software developer and routinely video conference, sharing my entire desktop to show what several tools are doing at once. Unfortunately, I've come to realize that many of the common screen sharing tools are inadequate when the team is running displays at different resolutions.
Apparently, I'm the worst offender: I recently upgraded to a single 34" display running at 3440x1440. When I share my desktop with my peers, they all see a scaled-down and illegible image as they typically use 1080p display resolution. So my question is basically how do we solve this problem with software? I'm not going to buy a second monitor just for screen sharing, and my peers are not going to buy a larger monitor either. I'm also not going to change screen resolution each time I need to share something, because then I need to reposition all my windows and tools afterwards.
Here are some ideas with my comments; I'm looking for a low-cost, no-hassle solution -- ideally one as simple as the share-my-desktop options in all the common screen sharing tools (Google, Microsoft, Zoom, etc...). I don't think this exists though, but I'm optimistic! How have you solved this problem?
Use "share window" or "share tab"
This is inadequate as I routinely need to share more than one window simultaneously. When I only need to share a single program, this works well -- until the program creates a dialog or other UI element that's not a part of the same window handle hierarchy (it is not captured by the video conferencing software).
Windows 10 Virtual Desktops
This would be nice, but all Windows 10 virtual desktops must run at the same resolution.
Open Broadcast Software (OBS)
I can setup a capture for a certain area of the screen. I can define a 1080p region on a virtual desktop wallpaper, setup OBS to capture only within that region, then setup a virtual camera so that OBS can output to the conferencing software. This is already a dozen implicit steps and is cumbersome as I need to make sure I position all the programs I want to share in that region. But that said, this might be the best option since the cost is low once OBS is setup.
Use a "fake" external display at a lower resolution
Similar to the OBS solution. Trick Windows to thinking a second display is setup with a custom dongle (for VGA, a resistor suffices) or leverage multiple inputs and outputs of the single display and computer.
