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Displayport: A Better Video Interface

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Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#331

Post by taeric »

deergomoo wrote: post #274
IggleSniggle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every monitor I've ever had has had terrible coil-whine from the headphone jack. I always try them for exactly this reason, and get super annoyed each time. It didn't have to be this way!

I have this problem on my gaming monitor, thankfully it also has USB-A ports so a cheap adapter has solved it. I have no idea if there are downsides to audio over USB-A but for my fairly basic use case (“being able to hear things and not hear coil whine”) it works pretty well.

Depends what your usb device is, all told. I have a USB C amp for audio that really is quite nice.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#332

Post by hot_gril »

dylan604 wrote: post #276
hot_gril wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, FireWire was a necessity at the time for certain use cases. Even basic consumer digital camcorders required FW400 to pull onto a PC.

I maybe mis-remembering, but was it possible to add FireWire to an existing PC with an expansion card? I know Thunderbolt was not possible from 3rd party vendors and only the mobo manufacturers could offer a card. I bought one to make a Hackintosh, but then a mobo firmware disabled the card because they didn't want to support it. I seem to recall Firewire being the same way

Yes, but with limited support. Macs were the only practical option for home video editing back then. iMac DV was released in 1999 with FW400, and iMovie was released at the same time. Media editing seemed like the central use case of Macs through the 2000s.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#333

Post by privacyking »

mr_toad wrote: post #312
privacyking wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a thunderbolt 4 cable it can do everything, at least until the 80gbps one comes out

Be nice if they weren’t 10x the price of normal USB-C cables.

You have to pay to play. Otherwise you get cables made on the cheap by Chinese manufacturers who cut corners

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#335

Post by pxc »

timgws wrote: post #299
pxc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Level1Techs KVM switches are rebranded Startech switches with 'dumber' firmwares whose dumbness affords better compatibility with niche DisplayPort features. I have a bunch of them and I like them pretty well, but getting a bunch of computers all plugged in turns out to be a bit of a nightmare, especially when you need some long-ish cable runs or you are daisy-chaining devices (e.g., multiple KVM switches, adding…

> The Level1Techs KVM switches are rebranded Startech switches. Another commenter posted that the L1Techs KVM are Rextron devices. The Startech switches are rebranded ConnectPro KVMs.

Huh. I just matched them based on visual similarity ages ago and was apparently very wrong. I'm sorry, and I wish I could edit my earlier comment. :(

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#336

Post by smitty1110 »

tivert wrote: post #77

Are there any KVM switches that do Displayport well (i.e. where switching between inputs does not look like a display disconnect to the PC)? I'm still using HDMI because I like to share my home multi-monitor setup between my personal machine and my work laptop, and the KVM switches are able to fool the PCs into thinking the monitor are always connected. Years ago I tried a Displayport switch, but it could not -- I as…

Belkin makes some, up to duplex 4k@60hz, but holy mother of god are they expensive.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#337

Post by josephg »

xxpor wrote: post #181
drbawb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a weird interaction with BIOS power on. The boot display drivers I have freak out if they aren't the active display and fail. I solve this by switching the KVM before I turn the computer on. After everything is booted into an OS, it works fine to switch. Do you have an AMD GPU by any chance? I have the level1tech 2-head DP 1.4 KVM, with an AMD RX 560 on a Linux host, and after updating to kernel 6.4 recently…

I have a similar issue with a Nvidia 1080Ti on my old desktop. It's related to the UEFI deciding if the iGPU or the Nvidia GPU should be primary and to disable the iGPU or if the iGPU should stay enabled.

If this is the problem, you can usually force the GPU choice one way or another in BIOS.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#338

Post by fake-name »

I strongly disagree with the basic thesis of this article.

HDMI is better then displayport. DVI is better then HDMI.

USB-C is a complete disaster (particularly when trying to tunnel displayport).

I have an ongoing hypothesis that the general robustness and pleasantness-of-use of a computer interface which will be implemented by multiple separate vendors is inversely proportional to it's complexity. As the interface protocol gets more complicated, it inevitably winds up with progressively more terrible implementations.

As you add more vendors implementing the same protocol, or more features to the same protocol, the likelihood of two vendors or two implementations by the same vendor finding a corner case where they fail to interoperate properly approaches 1.

I use dell laptops at work. Dell cannot get their own laptops to tunnel displayport over USB-C reliably to their own dell branded docks.

Additionally, if you have an nvidia GPU, certain displayport errors will BSOD the entire computer. *Yes, plugging in a slightly misbehaving display can crash your computer entirely*.

Displayport is a nightmare from the consumer's perspective. Will two displayport devices properly negotiate ? Who knows?

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#339

Post by nine_k »

smitty1110 wrote: post #336
tivert wrote: post #77

Are there any KVM switches that do Displayport well (i.e. where switching between inputs does not look like a display disconnect to the PC)? I'm still using HDMI because I like to share my home multi-monitor setup between my personal machine and my work laptop, and the KVM switches are able to fool the PCs into thinking the monitor are always connected. Years ago I tried a Displayport switch, but it could not -- I as…

Belkin makes some, up to duplex 4k@60hz, but holy mother of god are they expensive.

Look how expensive are the chips they are using.

High-speed, high-bandwidth, low-delay interfaces are apparently hard.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#340

Post by bdavbdav »

stephenr wrote: post #67
binkHN wrote: post #58

I didn’t realize Multi-Stream Transport (MST) requires OS support, and I was surprised to find out MacOS, with its great Thunderbolt support, does not support this. “Even” ChromeOS can do MST.

Technically macOS does support MST. But it only supports it to stitch together for a single display. It does not support daisy chaining two displays. Thankfully, every Mac for the last 7 years has Thunderbolt3 at least, so getting dual-4K-display from a single port/cable is still very doable, you just need a TB3 to dual DisplayPort or HDMI adapter.

Unfortunately, although it can work with certain Thunderbolt devices, many TB4 docks with the video path based on MST don’t work, causing havoc for mixed environments
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