How do I temporarily connect a computer to my AVR?

[Swerd]

Last December I was visited by some in-laws. That evening, the guy wanted to watch a movie he had on his laptop. This guy is nuts about movies and has a huge collection of movie digital copies he bought from Amazon Prime. But he has no AVR and only hooks up his laptop to his TV.

I have a Denon AVR X4500H receiver in my HT system. It can receive WiFi and I do have a WiFi router. Manual:

https://www.accessories4less.com/mas_assets/media/manuals/Denon/AVR-X4500H.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoogeLF_iCb74czd1ittqyVY7oypjnrMsh9ooNDIslNs5T1PmM9Q

I normally use a Roku streamer for video from sources like Netflix and Amazon. I don’t purchase movies, and I never bothered to hook up a computer to my HT system. The guy’s laptop had an HDMI outlet and he had a HDMI cable with him. My AVR has a number of HDMI inlets on the back, plus one on the front panel. At the time, I hooked up the laptop to the front panel HDMI inlet and hoped that would be enough. It didn’t work.

At the time, I had been home two weeks after a long stay in the hospital. I wasn’t at my best. Besides, it was late in the evening and I was in no mood to pull out the receiver far enough to find a way by trial & error. We did end up watching something, but I don’t remember how we hooked it up. It worked work well enough to watch, but the sound was kind of kludged.

A few days later, I wasted a fair amount of time looking in the owner’s manual for details how to temporarily hook up a computer to watch a movie. It was a Denon manual, thorough but poorly translated, so I never found an answer.

Does anyone know how to temporarily connect a computer to my AVR?

Do I somehow make use of the WiFi or HEOS to make this work? I never have used these methods and never bothered to learn about them.

 

[ryanosaur]

I connect my computer via hdmi to my tv with arc sending audio on to the AVR. I can use it as additional desktop or simply mirror my screen.

might require some settings be played with to get up and running.
Don’t forget HDMI cables can be pesky so perhaps that one was flawed or simply didn’t like your friend’s port.

 

[highfigh]

Last December I was visited by some in-laws. That evening, the guy wanted to watch a movie he had on his laptop. This guy is nuts about movies and has a huge collection of movie digital copies he bought from Amazon Prime. But he has no AVR and only hooks up his laptop to his TV.

I have a Denon AVR X4500H receiver in my HT system. It can receive WiFi and I do have a WiFi router. Manual:

https://www.accessories4less.com/mas_assets/media/manuals/Denon/AVR-X4500H.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoogeLF_iCb74czd1ittqyVY7oypjnrMsh9ooNDIslNs5T1PmM9Q

I normally use a Roku streamer for video from sources like Netflix and Amazon. I don’t purchase movies, and I never bothered to hook up a computer to my HT system. The guy’s laptop had an HDMI outlet and he had a HDMI cable with him. My AVR has a number of HDMI inlets on the back, plus one on the front panel. At the time, I hooked up the laptop to the front panel HDMI inlet and hoped that would be enough. It didn’t work.

At the time, I had been home two weeks after a long stay in the hospital. I wasn’t at my best. Besides, it was late in the evening and I was in no mood to pull out the receiver far enough to find a way by trial & error. We did end up watching something, but I don’t remember how we hooked it up. It worked work well enough to watch, but the sound was kind of kludged.

A few days later, I wasted a fair amount of time looking in the owner’s manual for details how to temporarily hook up a computer to watch a movie. It was a Denon manual, thorough but poorly translated, so I never found an answer.

Does anyone know how to temporarily connect a computer to my AVR?

Do I somehow make use of the WiFi or HEOS to make this work? I never have used these methods and never bothered to learn about them.

Sorry to see that you were in the hospital.....

I use YouTube when I want to find out about how to do things- aside from a lot of BS content, some of it is good.

HEOS will only receive the audio, not video- I use Roku for content other than over-the-air channels and I'm streaming YouTube to it now- look for a rectangular icon at the lower right corner with some small arcs, then choose the device you want to stream (cast)to- if more than one device is in the network, a menu will appear when you click on the icon (shown in the photo). The second photo shows the red box with the device menu.

You would need to enable/assign the HDMI input in the AVR's menu, as you would with other source devices.

 

[-Jim-]

@Swerd , I have a Denon AVR X4400H receiver in our Atmos HT system. I have used the Aux1 HDMI Input on the front of the receiver to input from a Laptop for REW, and had an issue with a 25 foot long HDMI Cable that should have worked but didn't. When I used a shorter 10 one, it worked fine.

I'll go try playing a movie to test it right now, but I don't expect any problem. Please stand by.

 

[-Jim-]

I just finished testing it, and it's really HDMI cable dependent with the Laptop on my Denon. My MSI Laptop is running Windows 10. I randomly picked an old 12 foot HDMI 1.4 cable from my bag of HDMI cables, and the Denon wasn't "seen" by the MSI when I plugged it in. I grabbed a 6 foot "High Speed with Ethernet" HDMI Cable which I think is 1.4b spec and it worked fine. I've been migrating all of my old HDMI cables towards the latest specs since we bought a 4K TV and 4k Blu-ray player. Hence having the old ones in a bag.

I've suspected since my REW testing that the Denon is very sensitive to the voltage drop applicable to some of the longer HDMI cables. (Conductor size will definitely play a part as well as the spec.) So my advice is to try it with the shortest HDMI Cable first to it it working, and then move up in length if you need to.

I hope this was helpful.