That's why it is a good idea if you're a presenter to always have a Decimator [1] or its cheaper and less-capable alternative from BMD [2] in your pocket. No matter what, both of them will make sure you can get at least a signal to any sink with an HDMI or SDI port. Even 20 years after EDID, negotiation issues reign supreme...
Personally, when I'm responsible for inhouse conferences, I always have the venue place a Decimator at the presenter desk and run the cable to the projector using SDI - particularly MacBooks and their USB-C dongles tend to have issues with cable lengths above 5-10 meters, I'd guess too low voltage swing.
I literally never ran into incompatibility issues with this setup, only issue I had was some dumbass thinking they could unplug the Decimator to charge their phone. Additionally, SDI makes it very easy to install a split-off run to a central recording site, even if it's 100 meters of cable run away, or a split screen at the presenter's feet. No negotiation issues, everything Just F...ing Works.
[1] https://decimator.com/Products/MiniConverters/12G-CROSS/12G-...
[2] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/miniconverters/...
(Side note: I don't think it is a particularly clever idea of Decimator Design to fill their logo and homepage with images of large spiders. They are effectively eliminating around 10% of the population with arachnophobia as customers, and are making the experience of visiting their website slightly uncomfortable for large parts of the remaining population.)
A multitude of things, depending on how you configure it:
- signal boosting of low-voltage or otherwise problematic HDMI or SDI signals, including reclocking. That's imposing virtually no latency and if you're running in a TV broadcast environment with centralized clocking it makes work easier for the downstream mixer. Primarily, it avoids issues with mis-designed sources such as cheap-ass adapter dongles that have signal integrity issues - as long as it's "good enough" for the Decimator to recognize it will output a clean and high-strength signal.
- format conversion from HDMI/DVI to SDI and vice versa. That imposes a tiny bit of latency and allows the usage of "consumer" equipment with broadcast equipment, or if you use two Decimators linked by SDI, you can "just" go for far longer cable runs than you could ever do with HDMI - up to 100m, in practice way more.
- up and downscaling as well as framerate conversions. This is where things really get interesting - no matter what kind of source and sink you use or what their limitations are, the scaler engine can make them talk. That includes color space conversions and bandwidth as well, and it's particularly useful if you, say, have a 12G SDI link from the source to the sink, and you want to use an older display for additional monitoring. Splice a Decimator in there and it will output the full quality signal on one output while providing a scaled-down signal on the second output.
Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
Well, the workaround is a 10$ HDCP stripper from ebay. Easy enough. (And I think that both Decimators and BMD converters also strip HDCP, but don't quote me on that)
> Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
Well, conference setups tend to be a hit and miss IME. Some where the venue and the conference is run by dedicated professionals, you don't even have to tell them to place Decimators and SDI cable runs, they'll come in with these from the start in their offer... but a lot of smaller venues and conferences (especially those ran by volunteers / NGOs) don't have that knowledge and just place some random home cinema projector together with a 20 meter HDMI cable. Corporate offices are just as bad IME, I've never seen a corp conference room with anything but HDMI or, in the worst cases, VGA. Corporate just doesn't give a flying fuck unless they got a dedicated team and a proper budget working on conference room setups...
I do a bunch of international travel, and the HD-LX seems ideal sized, but it seems like it doesn't do most of the useful functions?
EDID negotiation or signal integrity issues in HDMI, good luck diagnosing actual causes without highly specialized (and expensive...) equipment.
Inscrutable, and infamous, though they may be:
I'd put it in the same bucket as TODO lists. After centuries we're still not set.
I guess it's something one can throw AI at. It probably doesn't need GPUs, just some audio filters.
My biggest complaints about this approach are that I can't easily see speaker notes (I have a fiddly workaround that I can use if I need it, but it would be nice if Google Slides would support the ChromeCast use case a little better..) and that the TVs/projectors tend to screw around for 10-15 seconds before automatically choosing the right source.
I can get a speaker notes and a normal presentation tab open and cast one of them, but they all jump around and do the wrong thing on my screen (wanting to maximize, etc) and require a lot of coercion; too much time to start a normal lecture.
Sounds like you are having network issues/bit errors? You are breaking up.
Sounds like your bluetooth is having issues? You are breaking up.
Sounds like they are mobile, and in a weak service area? You are breaking up.
Any type of problem like that ultimately becomes a "5 Whys?" kind of troubleshooting to get to a real root cause, and from a end-user device you generally don't have the necessary access or data to answer more than 2-3 layers of abstraction.
That is like a relative saying you are not an IT expert because you don't know immidiately what the distinct root cause of "the screen being black" is.
Who knows where such a thing comes from? It could be any number of things on a huge technological stack distributed over a large geographical area.
A domain expert should of course be able to distinguish various bad conditions by ear, e.g. clipping, saturation, wromg microphone distances/orientation, signal interferences, hum, bad grounding etc.
But not all people are good at analytical hearing regardless of them being engineers or not. That is why people pay the likes of me.
These days however nothing seems to work for anyone.
Programmers are running some custom Linux distro with a custom window manager and other customizations.
Windows vs the X server may make a difference. But which X11 WM you use should be irrelevant.
It drives me crazy that there's not a long running named process in e.g. GNOME the DE that if I run will cause my fn-volume keys on my laptop keyboard to change the volume any WM, the same as when I'm running GNOME? Why isn't that piece separated out? Or at least, where is the code so I can separate it out?
Questions and experiences like that cause many to conflate behavior and experience with WM/DE.
Even my Mac (which, to Apple's credit, does work 100% reliably with projectors) still struggles when I plug in multiple external monitors, blanking the screen, turning on one external display, blanking them both, turning on the other one, and so on. This is a manufacturer who normally accepts only a smooth, polished user experience, and they still can't get it perfect. What chance do Lenovo or similar garbage-tier plastic box manufacturers have of getting it right?
(As they should be.)
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
> I had to retire from my career do to schizophrenia. Again, I should have not let my delusions go to the point they did nor should I have acted the way it does. My illness doesn’t detract from the rashness of my actions.
There a lot of technical word salad there, like "When I say hacked, I lost every device. They rooted my charge arbitrator, I was bios bonded and I basically lost every document and all my software."
The problem is the marketing and getting people to use it.
You can easily make the best product and still not being able to get the word out there.
Though wget isn't perfect for mirroring, as it will typically download large amounts of resources redundantly only differing in URL query params when those refer to the same content, such as on typical WeirdPress sites with comment links. Ideal would be an HTTP client with http/3, auth token, and keepalive support etc. based on libcurl that can be customized, such as via "href handlers" triggered by event-driven markup parsers for SGML (though CSS and JS imports need special treatment).
Because the library gets ported to every new platform anyways (it's what people use so will be the first to be ported to a new architecture or whatever) so the cli gets support for everything new "for free" so can outcompete wget (because it's always _there_ and works the same).
Now, there's also the fact that the curl cli is a fantastic piece of software, but in terms of features I don't think there's that much between curl and wget for simple cli usecases (but I still use curl).
What other common cases take flags on curl but not wget?
Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part
I couldn't say when curl was released without looking it up, but I know it's been around for at least a couple of decades. There were not many command-line tools for dealing with web stuff, and curl got picked up by most Linux distributions, the BSDs, and various embedded things because it was the only tool that did what it did, as well as it did. And then it became famous essentially for being ubiquitous, like bash or vim.
"Marketing" seems to have had very little (if anything at all) to do with it.
But curl was something new when it came out, and it truly filled a void both as a cli tool and as a library. It needed no marketing. We needed it.
It's hard now to imagine a world without a tool like curl, but quite a few of us are old enough to remember it still.
https://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/
Recently set up something similar for Windows as a win in the battle against time wasted thanks to auto-logout.
His commitment to spread the word of curl and OSS is really admirable.
It was a delightful presentation.