As you well know it is necessary to have a monitor or a TV to connect a console to in order to use it and play with it, so it is likely that many of you have wondered if a laptop or even an All in One has an integrated screen Can you connect a console and use that screen to play? In this article we are going to address this and we are going to tell you about the alternatives that exist.
If you use a traditional PC consisting of the equipment with its monitor and peripherals, and the monitor has an HDMI connection, it is very easy to connect a PS4, Xbox One or other consoles and use the PC monitor to play (in fact, if the monitor has multiple video inputs you won’t even have to connect and disconnect one and the other to switch between PC and console). However, with laptops and AIOs things change, despite the fact that they also have an HDMI port.
No, you can’t connect the console to your laptop
Literally, you can actually connect it. The problem is that the HDMI ports of laptops are only video output ports, that is, they only serve to output the image from the laptop to an external monitor and not the other way around. So even though you can connect the console to a laptop it won’t do any good because that HDMI doesn’t support incoming connections.
And the thing is that the laptop screen is connected directly and internally to the motherboard and does not have any other video input than the one provided by the computer’s own graphics card. With All in One computers , with some exceptions that do have an HDMI input port and that is clearly identified as “HDMI In”, exactly the same thing happens: even if you can connect the console, you will not see anything on the computer screen.
For practical purposes, a console is like a computer and its HDMI port is equally as an output and never an input. Therefore, both the HDMI ports of consoles and laptops are always output and only serve to directly connect a monitor or TV to them, so except in the case that we have mentioned before, there are some exceptions in All in computers. One, you will never be able to use the laptop screen to connect a console.
Not directly, but you can play on your laptop
Fortunately, all is not lost, at least with next-gen consoles. In the case of SONY’s PlayStation 4 there is PS4 Remote Play, while in the case of Microsoft consoles we have Xbox Play Anywhere, two different systems but with the same purpose: to be able to play their respective consoles directly on a PC. We just need to have the software installed, connect the console controller to the PC or laptop and have LAN connectivity between the PC and the console.
In the case of the Xbox, the thing goes further, since instead of needing specific software, the games are directly linked to your account, and you can enjoy them on PC without even having to have the console turned on or that they are on LAN. The game catalog is quite a bit more limited in this case and only a handful are compatible, but something is something.
Unfortunately, at present these are the only alternatives we have to be able to play the console on a laptop, except for the rare exceptions of equipment that incorporates an HDMI input port.
