[pulseaudio-discuss] Devices with dynamic capabilities (HDMI) - revisited

[David Henningsson]

On 01/23/2013 09:30 PM, Pierre-Louis Bossart wrote:
>> Anyway, I'm proposing that cards are dynamically added and removed as
>> HDMI monitors are plugged in and out, for the following reasons:
>>
>>  1) An HDMI monitor is a lot like a USB card in that sense that it
>> affects the streaming capabilities. Assuming we add some part of the
>> ELD info as the card name, it enables us to save information per
>> monitor rather than per output, so that, e g, when a user's laptop is
>> connected to his TV at home, audio gets rerouted, but not when he's
>> connecting to his projector at work, or something like that.
>
> Sounds good but there are practical difficulties with your proposal.

Thanks for your insights.

> On
> some of my boxes, HDMI is only detected if plugged-in at boot time
> (could be BIOS only detection).

I have not heard of this bug before. Are you sure this is not 
pre-release buggy hardware or something? Can it be fixed in the kernel?

> Then the HDA device will accept PCM and
> 'render' audio, even without any cable plugged.

> And last, the ELD
> information can be completely garbled or misleading.

At a minimum we could replace all garbled characters with something 
else, or say that if we find a character out of the ordinary, we use 
some fallback name instead.

I'm thinking that if we start using the ELD info more, maybe monitor 
manufacturers will start to care about getting it right :-) but maybe 
that's wishful thinking?


-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic