It was that connecting something to a TV or monitor was like throwing garbage onto a truck. You plugged within the analog cables and the TV just showed what was sent. If the image looked incorrect in any way, akin to having strange colours or being the incorrect size, it was as much as the user to repair the issue. Nonetheless, today most digital displays and video sources support a regular called Prolonged Display Identification Data (EDID).
The aim of EDID is to permit devices to speak with one another and share details about their capabilities in order that each devices are on the identical page. The fundamental way it really works is that when two devices are connected via an EDID-enabled protocol akin to HDMI or Display Port, the display tells the source device its manufacturer, model, and supported resolutions and color spaces. The source device will then take this information and output a video signal corresponding to those parameters, which is a component of how the automated settings of something like a game console work.
Once the source receives the EDID information out of your screen, it may mechanically display the sport in the proper resolution and color space, and even enable HDR if vital. Not less than that is the way it should work. Like many things in technology, adding processing to make setup more convenient introduces quite a lot of things that may go incorrect.
A minor annoyance is that EDID data should be processed at every point within the device chain, so it’s possible you’ll experience higher latency in the event you route the source device through the receiver. So be prepared for some black screen time if you turn all the pieces on for the primary time. But greater problems may arise.
As you’ll be able to see, because modern interfaces like HDMI support hot-plugging, which implies they will be connected and disconnected while the system is running, the connector has a special pin that detects hot-plugging.
When the device detects voltage at the new plug, it starts the EDID process. Nonetheless, sometimes devices don’t read the new plug signal in the identical way because it might be implemented inconsistently, so the EDID exchange never takes place. You find yourself with a blank screen because one device within the chain might imagine it isn’t connected to anything.
But even in the event you do not have an issue along with your configuration completely refusing to work, hardware shipping with invalid EDID information encoded is a more common problem than we might like. A tool akin to an A/V receiver may very well have the opportunity to simply accept a surround sound signal, yes, EDID also works with audio, but as a result of bad EDID information, a connected device akin to a decoder or Blu-ray player may not work to send it because this particular receiver won’t say, “Hey, I support Dolby Digital plus.” Frustratingly, this is usually a firmware problem resulting from programming oversights, meaning the hapless home user cannot easily fix it themselves.
And the truth is, the same wrongdoer was behind a recent issue where some Sony TVs were unable to display a Dolby Vision signal in 4K resolution at 120 Hertz, which was obviously disappointing for owners of gaming PCs or Xbox Series X consoles. You see, EDID actually has limits characters, which seems to stop these displays from telling the video source what it supports, since they simply support so many things nowadays.
Other times, devices may receive the proper EDID information but not act on it properly. For instance, a pc connected to a display knows via EDID that the display can support a wide range of resolutions and a spread of refresh rates. Nonetheless, as a substitute of selecting the native resolution with the best possible refresh rate, it might default to a very different resolution, which implies you’ve to enter the settings and adjust all the pieces yourself, which sort of defeats the aim.
When you are having problems with EDID, there are special EDID emulators that you would be able to program yourself to make sure that the proper information is being transmitted. But after all, it’s often easier to simply take a moment and check that the settings you’ll be able to adjust are what you would like. It’s type of annoying that we have not found out the right way to get EDID to work properly without intervention each time, but hey, we have not found out the right way to make self-checkouts not completely suck either.
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