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I have a cable box in my room and wish to connect it to my laptop, Asus N56VB. The cable box has a HDMI output, and the laptop itself has a HDMI port as well, which I know is an output only.

My question is, can I use some device, like a HDMI capture box, to watch TV in real time?

The cable box has the following connectors:

Possible devices:

I have been told that I can use them, but it seems strange because they pass the video/audio using a HDMI cable, but as far as I know, the HDMI port on my laptop is output only.

Or maybe I need the Magewell HDMI to USB 3.0 Video Capture Dongle.

Thank you.

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  • The HDMI port on a laptop is almost always a output only connector unless explicitly specified its a input connector. The AVerMedia capture card is a great device to capture video in real time. It is easy to use and have a lot of features.
    – Peter Zhu
    Nov 17, 2015 at 0:45
  • So you want to watch tv on your pc through the cablebox?
    – Rudra Matroja
    Nov 17, 2015 at 8:19
  • youtube.com/watch?v=l1Z9Ax61qWw here's how you can use your laptop as a secondary screen with another PC. I'm pretty sure your cable box won't manage to send a video signal to the network. In either case, the HDMI is not the solution
    – Rudra Matroja
    Nov 17, 2015 at 8:24
  • @RudraMatroja thank you, but the video is a for a completely different purpose, it doesn't help. And yes, I want to watch TV on my laptop screen by using the cablebox in my room. By the way, I updated to post.
    – nettek
    Nov 17, 2015 at 8:40
  • You also should note that the cable box probably uses DRM (HDCP) on the output, so your capture card needs to be HDCP compatible, or you need to install a HDCP stripping device of some sort between cable box and capture card.
    – Jonas Czech
    Jan 5, 2018 at 13:20

1 Answer 1

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Get a capture card! The AVerMedia AVerCapture HD that you linked is along the lines of what you want, but it's not my top recommendation.

Take a look at the Elgato HD60 S, a low latency USB 3.0 HDMI capture card (should work just fine with your laptop's USB 3.0 ports.) It's not exactly cheap by any means at $180, but it's the best I know of.

You should then be able to monitor the capture card's video using either Elgato's provided software or something like VLC or OBS.

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