A tiny $4 HDMI dummy plug somehow fixed my entire game streaming setup

Published Sep 10, 2026, 3:01 PM EDT Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally. By and large, my entire setup, whether it's my home lab, my TV-and-console unit, or my desktop rig, consists of components that earn their place by doing their job well. But other gadgets earn their place by fixing one silly problem that keeps getting in my way. My $4 HDMI dummy plug falls squarely into that second category. It's barely bigger than any of my thumb drives and is pretty much invisible even while it's in use. I bought it to fix my game streaming problem as I tried to self-host my gaming library and stream it from the living room. However, getting that arrangement to behave involved more fiddling and tweaking than I was prepared for. Thankfully, plugging in a tiny HDMI dummy plug fixed the irritations, but I wasn't quite ready for just how much more useful it could become. The problem was never really the TV My gaming PC had a display problem I've been getting into streaming my games from my desktop to the TV through Sunshine and Moonlight, but the setup has had an annoying habit of making me earn it through multiple tweaks and hours of frustration. Without a display attached to the GPU, I've fought Windows over resolutions and displays, and Sunshine over which screen to use and stream, every single day. Now, for the most part, I've made it work (with a ton of patience), but my idea of a smooth PC-to-TV gaming experience has never included babysitting the entire setup every time I boot the PC or turn on the TV. In my particular desktop setup, both of my physical monitors connect over DisplayPort, leaving my RTX 4070 Ti's sole HDMI port completely unused. So, instead of wasting that port, I bought one of those tiny HDMI dummy plugs that runs 4K60Hz and plugged it into my GPU. A dummy HDMI plug is essentially a tiny dongle that convinces the GPU there's a physical monitor connected, when in reality there isn't. It does this by feeding the GPU fake display credentials (resolutions, refresh rates, the works) so the graphics card stays awake and behaves as if a real screen were plugged in. The important part, of course, is what this pretend monitor lets me do. Streaming is how my tiny plug earns its keep My TV gets its own display to feed off The dummy HDMI plug has proven itself most when it comes to Sunshine. Through self-hosting, my desktop has become my game server, and I want to be able to simply go to my living room and start playing effortlessly. That wouldn't have been possible without the dummy display. Once it's plugged in, Windows sees it as a third monitor. That third screen's Display ID is what I copy and paste into Sunshine's manual display settings — this is how I have finally managed to stop it from hijacking one of my two physical monitors. My actual screens remain available for whatever I happen to be doing at my desk, while the TV gets its own dedicated display target. You can find any connected display device's Device ID for Sunshine in C: > Program Files > Sunshine > Config > Sunshine.log. The particular dummy plug I use advertises 4K at 60Hz. That's come in particularly handy because my TV can use that resolution and refresh rate without me having to keep configuring Sunshine for a 4K stream every time the PC boots. Even better, the dummy display comes up when the PC does. Since Sunshine starts with Windows, the whole setup is ready before I even pick up the controller. I don't have to manually switch on any monitors, fix resolutions, bring up the Windows Project menu, or fiddle with settings before I can bring up my Steam library on my TV. The entire point of streaming my video game library is to replicate the living room console experience as closely as possible, and I've achieved just that with a properly boring routine. I wake the PC, turn off the lights, walk to the living room, pick up my controller, open Moonlight, and begin playing since the entire setup streams directly to the third phantom display created by the HDMI dummy plug. For a gadget whose entire job is pretending to be something that isn't there, it has eliminated a surprisingly real problem. It isn't perfect, but I sure prefer it to software The tiny plug beats another GitHub project Before the HDMI plug arrived, I used a virtual display driver from GitHub to accomplish roughly the same thing. It worked, right up until Windows decided it didn't. A physical dummy plug has a rather boring advantage: it doesn't depend on a driver surviving the next Windows update. The dummy display is always ready at startup, even before Windows loads, and it works across operating system reinstalls as well. VDC (Virtual Display Control), on the other hand, had me reinstalling the driver after every third or fourth startup because it just "felt like it." I do occasionally run into problems when Windows, with a mind of its own, develops some creative ideas about where things belong. My mouse often wanders off into the void, and it takes me a while to bring it back to my primary display. Other times, some applications remember the dummy display as their preferred monitor, leaving me staring at an empty desktop until I physically unplug the dummy plug from my GPU. In fact, even Windows itself sometimes decides that the hidden screen is where my desktop should live. Now, these are random quirks that I can easily live with, since they're pretty predictable by now. I'd rather deal with the occasional disappearing cursor than maintain a virtual display driver and wonder whether the next Windows update will break my streaming setup. The tiny HDMI plug may create a few new annoyances, but at the end of the day, it did permanently remove the one I actually cared about. UGREEN HDMI Dummy Plug A good upgrade makes you forget it exists I have spent considerably more money on hardware that was supposed to transform my setup, only to end up using it exactly as I did before. The HDMI dummy plug is the opposite. It removed the one tiny obstacle I had somehow accepted as part of using my game streaming setup. That's why I like it so much. Good hardware is usually something you notice because it adds capability. Great little accessories are the things you stop noticing entirely because they silently make the annoying part disappear. This one cost next to nothing, and it fixed a problem I was tired of solving. I will take that over any other flashy upgrade any day.