I have four USB HDMI capture cards plugged into four different laptops which have their video stream sent to them from a desktop running OBS. There are several HDMI cables running from the desktop into each HDMI port of each capture card, which is then plugged into each laptop via USB.
The problem is that they all show up as the same name (I only had 3 plugged in at the time of the screenshots below). The dell is just a peripheral monitor I use to control the desktop.
Unfortunately, because each laptop restarts or powers off occasionally, Windows 10 on the Desktop detects that as a monitor disconnecting and then being reconnected. This leads to big problems for me because I'm trying to use OBS to project different video streams to each laptop, but every time a laptop restarts, Windows seems to do some internal reordering of the display indexes. They stay in the same spatial position once the capture card reconnects, in other words they don't move from this picture other than for the brief time the laptop is off:
But some kind of internal monitor numbering or ordering changes somehow when this happens, because the indexes OBS was using to determine which monitor is which get switched around.
This may be an OBS problem rather than a Windows problem, but I may be able to solve it if I can somehow write an OBS script to distinguish the displays, assuming I can find anything unique to distinguish them.
Considering I can't rely on the display index, since that changes when a laptop restarts, and I can't rely on the name (they are all named "HDMI TO USB"), I'm wondering if there is any other information I can obtain to somehow distinguish each display. If I could find something, literally anything, that uniquely identifies them and pull that into an OBS script, and then match that up with how OBS indexes the monitors, I could solve this problem.
I need a way to reliably distinguish these displays, which persists even after they are unplugged and plugged back in (the equivalent of the laptop restarting). Is this possible?
