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The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

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Re: The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

#5
The rise of more powerful graphics cards with the ports and ability to run multiple monitors made this something that ever fewer desktop users need that did before. You can still get good KVMs in the enterprise/hardware market, they are common in server rooms, but even then less so than the old days as most firmware allows remote management.

Re: The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

#6
I'd guess the comment about HDCP is onto something. To build a KVM switch that works with modern displays without weird errors, it probably has to be an active HDMI/HDCP endpoint on its own - which means a vendor would either need to get its own sets of keys and do additional work to enforce all DRM restrictions - or they'd have to use leaked keys and prepare to get sued in an instant.

Even without HDCP, I remember another article explaining that it's already difficult enough to get two arbitrary HDMI devices to talk to each other because HDMI allows so many different modes of operation. I imagine the situation would get even worse if you had to negotiate common protocols for three endpoints at the same time.

Re: The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

#7
post #6

I'd guess the comment about HDCP is onto something. To build a KVM switch that works with modern displays without weird errors, it probably has to be an active HDMI/HDCP endpoint on its own - which means a vendor would either need to get its own sets of keys and do additional work to enforce all DRM restrictions - or they'd have to use leaked keys and prepare to get sued in an instant. Even without HDCP, I remember a…

What if it physically unplugged the HDMI connection, and reconnected it to the other device? It wouldn't be quite as seamless since the initialization process would be repeated, but it would work.

Re: The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM

#9
The main thing that has pissed me off with technologies like DisplayPort and HDMI is that I cannot actually turn my monitors off when I'm not using my computer. With DVI I could turn the monitors off and the desktop and applications would stay where they were. With HDMI/Displayport it considers the monitor disconnected, hence re-adjusts the desktop and moves everything around.

I would love an option that I could switch on and it would "disable HDCP" on these monitors so they could function like they did before. Sure I couldn't play some videos but that's not a great loss for me.

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