The only way i got this 5 port, 4K HDMI switch to behave is by combining it with dummy HDMI adapters (here), In my setup, they are limited to 30FPS (Not sure if this switch can handle more, but the dummy HDMI adapter itself is limited to 30FPS at 4K)
Once the adapters are at the endings of all 5 input cables, the switch works perfectly, but what happens without them
Without them, there are a couple of problems, the PCs switch the video output off, and there is a delay before it comes back once it detects a screen has been connected again, so you keep clicking till you get lucky with the monitor you are looking for, not to mention that in the case of multiple monitors, the operating system keeps changing the monitor setup assuming that screens are coming and going !
the switch comes with a handy remote control (That i don’t use because the button is right here in front of me), but it will be handy in case you are using a PC that is relatively far
Also worth noting is that it can identify which screen are connected, so you do not need to go through all 5 inputs if only 2 are connected, it will only switch between those two
in any case, let me know in the comments if you have any questions
A nice adapter that has both input and output is this which i got from AliExpress (Photos at the bottom)
This 4K dummy adapter seems to support all resolutions up to 60Hz refresh rate, with the exception of 4K which works at a maximum of 30Hz (Probably due to signal attenuation)
There are many uses for this dummy adapter, one of them is “Sunshine and moonlight remote desktop”, another is using your GPU for processing while you are away (Nvidia won’t allow it if you don’t have a monitor connected and switched on), and most importantly TO ME, My video switch since I use multiple machines on the same monitor.
What this adapter is in reality is an eeprom chip that has the EDID data of a monitor with a very high refresh rate (120 hz), namely a fictitious monitor named AOC 28E850, If you want to make sure that this works with your monitor, it needs to be flashed with your monitor’s EDID.
If your monitor supports 4K at 60hz, you need to keep everything in that copy, and remove the 4K.60Hz from the list
If you want the modified file that originated from my LG 27UL550 and was modified to remove the 60Hz from the list of supported configurations, meaning I removed the 60 FPS from the 4K DTD, then here it is, just download it and flash it (Flashing instructions below) I also changed the monitor’s name just in case some systems might cache it’s details…
The steps
1- Find out the port on your graphics card that your monitor is connected to
2- Copy the EDID data from your monitor
3- Edit the data to remove the 4K/60 fps 4- Burn the data onto the adapter
To do that, there are many tools, one thing to note is that edid-rw did not work using my laptop which has a 9400mx, but worked just fine using an old PC i have with a “GT218 [GeForce 210]”, the error on the laptop reads
sudo ./edid-rw 5 Traceback (most recent call last): File “./edid-rw”, line 131, in main() File “./edid-rw”, line 119, in main edid = [dev.read(i) for i in range(EDID_HDR)] File “./edid-rw”, line 46, in read return self.smb.read_byte_data(EDID_ADDR, n) IOError: [Errno 110] Connection timed out
Now, you have python, let us download the tool, you can do that with the download button on github, I would rather just
git clone https://github.com/bulletmark/edid-rw cd edid-rw
To begin with, you may need to run the following command to see what monitors are connected where, In my case, the monitor I want to copy (LG 4K 60FPS) is #5
xrandr --query
If this does not help, try the numbers and read the output to see which entry corresponds to the screen you want
sudo ./edid-rw 5 | edid-decode
Now that we have it, we can edit it with one of the software mentioned above, and dump it back on the dongle (The port number does not change, so put your number there and dump the data onto it)
udo ./edid-rw -w 5 < ~/edited_lgedid.bin
Text from the original page of the item
Support hot plug, plug and play Support virtual display, when the display is powered off or the display cable is hot-plugged, It can achieve no video signal loss, no screen change, no windows running, no order disorder; Support up to 10.8Gbps video bandwidth; It has power-off memory function, power-off/restart display sequence is not chaotic, and the set mode is not lost. Supports for AMD multi-screen image card splicing extended split-screen mode, eyefinity wide-area multi-screen splicing mode (pulling the monitor cable when it is powered on has no effect on the display of the screen TV wall, and pulling the line will only cause the screen of the dropped line to be black, and other screens will not move) Support Nvidia image card multi-screen output, the screen sequence is not chaotic after restart
Connect typ:HDMI Application scope: Display with HDMI interface Product name :HDMI lock screen treasure Max Resolution : 2560 x 1440@60HZ / 3840 x 2160@60HZ colour:Golden Material:Aluminum alloy
Package Contents: 6 x HDMI2.0 Virtual Adapter
The aluminum sleeve appears to be fully cosmetic, At least this is my impression as the plastic inside seems very hard, so it is unlikely that the aluminum is providing any support, and obviously is not functioning as any form of heat sink
VNC and RDP are great and all, and for so many purposes, they are the goto solution for remoting into a machine.
Now, another solution which is great (And much better if you have the bandwidth) is to broadcast your screen video and do all the work on the server rather than the client
The solution used to be nvidia’s game stream, which was abandoned by nvidia, the new solution based on nvidia would be the sunshine (Server) and moonlight client
The sunshine+moonlight duo work on almost every platform I need, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Even LG TVs running web OS… in short, it is a more universal solution. You can even create a virtual non existent monitor under linux and stream that to a different device !
So, let us start with the server (Sunshine)
Sunshine on debian
Installing sunshine on debian is very easy as a .deb installation file is provided, sunshine is not yet in the debian repositories, but if i understand the license correctly, it can be some time in the future
Now, go to the sunshine website, and download the deb file., in my case, I visit this webpage, and download the sunshine-debian-bookworm-amd64.deb file
Now, from the command prompt, su (to run as root), then cd to the directory where your deb file resides, then “sudo apt install ./sunshine-debian-bookworm-amd64.deb”, We should now have the server running and waiting to be opened in the web browser, Now, on the command line , type “sunshine”
Point a web browser to https://localhost:47990/, ignore the problem with self signed certificates, and set your username and password
Now, your debian computer is running a sunshine server, go to any other machine where you want to install the client (moonlight) from here , and connect to your server by its IP address.
You are done !
Sunshine on Windows
Download sunshine on windows from the latest release (As of today, you will fine it here)
Install it like you would any other application, once done, the official help page will show up (this)
once you click finish, a page at https://localhost:47990/welcome will open, asking you to create a password, create one, the default username is sunshine, but you can use whatever you want (In my case, it is my default RDP password)
you are done, you can now access the windows PC from any device with moonlight
This may look like a long post at first, but in reality, it is but a few commands, the rest is output and small simple explanations, so don’t be discouraged by the length, it is really neither complicated nor lengthy.
Yet, you do need to check the hardware requirements before you get your hands dirty, you will find them in the “Minimum hardware requirements” section of this post
UPDATE 2024-07-31: 8 months down the line, Still using this, and it works like a charm, No issues at all
The maximum power draw a PC with many hard drives happens at boot time, in my case, the PC is a n intel atom D525MW, which hardly draws any power
What this means is that I need an oversized power supply that only does its thing at startup, then becomes an inefficient power supply right after, why this is particularly important is because this computer runs on a UPS, and the number of minutes it can stay up is a very important number.
The solution is to enable PUIS (Power up in standby), what this does is allow the disks not to spin as soon as they get power, but instead, spin up upon reception of a command from the controller. so in effect, the disks are spun up sequentially (In turn).
So, after a lot of research that lead to nothing, I installed the GT 710 card on a PC and fired up a youtube browser window, changed the settings to 4K, and found a bunch of rapidly moving 4K videos.
Even without H265 and VP9, the videos play fine on my 4K screen with 4K resolution settings, hope this helps
This disk was around 40GB, but fdisk will see the number corresponding to the largest allowed size, 100GB in this case ! let us mount the drive
mount /dev/nbd0p2 /hds/loop
Now, in this case in particular, like any other block device that held the windows operating system, more often than not, you will get the message saying
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only
The solution to that is simple, follow the following two steps to remedy the issue and then force mount the file by using remove_hiberfile
ntfsfix /dev/nbd0p2
mount -t ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/nbd0p2 /hds/loop
The result of NTFSFIX was
Mounting volume... The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... OK
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/nbd0p2 was processed successfully.
And the following mount command worked as you would expect, silently
Now, if you want to disconnect the NBD image, you need to unmount (Like you normally would) THEN
#Disconnect the image from the NBD device qemu-nbd --disconnect /dev/nbd0; #Unload the NBD module rmmod nbd;
1- Large disks need to have their block size specified, without it, disks like my 6TB and my 8Tb hard drives will not work, badblocks will report the following error.
badblocks: Value too large for defined data type invalid end block (5860522584): must be 32-bit value
So the solution is to add the block size, like the following for example (This one is destructive)
badblocks -b 4096 -wsv /dev/sdb
It is a good idea to LOG THE BAD SECTORS (this is the command i usually use for a destructive test)
In the command above, the W means do a destructive red-write test, the S is for show progress, and the V is for show the errors you encounter, the -o flowed by a file name is where to keep the log file
Hyper-v does not provide USB passthrough, some people use USB redirection from remote desktop RDP… A similar technology might be USB over network, but this does not always work, as many USB devices have very little tolerance for lag ! and this will introduce some lag !
My objective is to connect a MINI-VCI connected on a raspberry PI to a computer running other software to analyze the data, whether this works or not is yet to be seen.
There seems to be a few solutions online, some using generic hardware, and some using specialty hardware
The most diverse of those solutions that can work on everything from a raspberry pi to a windows computer and android phone is (https://www.virtualhere.com/), but I have not yet verified whether this software is USB/IP compatible or not
USB/IP has been built into the linux kernel for some time now, and a couple of solutions for both server and client are available on github, So here I will be investigating what I can do to bridge the Linux Raspberry PI to my windows PC,
USBIP is a protocol where the server is the machine connected to the USB device via wire, and the client is the machine that needs to use the USB device but is not connected to it via USB.
In linux, usbipd is the name of the server, and usbip being the client, In debian, both server and client are included in the usbip package, hence, on the raspberry PI and on the Linux server, we need to run the command
apt-get install usbip
The modules of USB/IP (usbip-core, usb-host, and vhci-hcd) are already included,
We will get to the Windows client after the Linux to Linux section
The two options
In the cases we are exploring here, the server is a Raspberry Pi (3), the client is a Windows machine, but there are a couple of things to try first, the Windows clients are KVM virtual machines, we will try
1- The client is the Linux Host machine hosting the windows virtual machines, and the USB port is passed to the virtual machine
OR
2- The Windows client has the USBIP driver directly connecting to the Raspberry PI server
The Steps
Installing the USB/IP server on the raspberry pi “apt-get install usbip”
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