Hi,
Owen wrote:
I've seen a (1080p) TV where the VID & PID identified it as a IBM Thinkpad with a native resolution of 1280x1024. So there are definitely dreadful devices out there.
How can any device (that uses the old EISA PnP IDs) be identified as a laptop, given that laptops don't have a VID & PID to begin with?
Owen wrote:
There are also lots of non-dreeadful cases where the VID & PID won't identify the display. For example, if probe one of the HDMI ports on my PC it will identify itself as a
Yamaha DSP-AX763. From that you can identify nothing of the capabilities of my display - because it's not a display, there happens to be a display connected behind it!
Yes. One of my KVMs does strange things and lets some computers have the monitor's EDID while preventing other computers from doing the same.
For these problems my code does currently allow a user to provide (and/or override) the display's VID & PID; but it's a "boot script variable" that has to be set before the OS boots and requires admin permissions (rather than something a normal user can touch during boot), and it's something that isn't necessary for the intended use of the OS (and something that may be removed eventually).
Note 1: For the intended use of the OS (a distributed system) the OS determines which output device/s and forwards data (via. LAN) to a computer directly connected to the output device. There'd be no need for special hardware in the middle, like KVMs or AV receivers (although you might still want simple audio amplifiers).
Note 2: I have no intention of supporting "encrypted video+sound over the same cable" DRM schemes.
Cheers,
Brendan