Re: [Balloon] Balloon4 - progress & questions...

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Author: Steve Wiseman
Date:  
To: Jonathan McDowell, balloon
Subject: Re: [Balloon] Balloon4 - progress & questions...

On Mon 23/05/11 22:21 , Jonathan McDowell <> wrote:

> Can you do enough of HDMI to do the DVI bits, without doing the HDCP
> stuff, thus making it a bit easier? Or is it all or nothing?


It avoids the (prodigious) audio hassle, the licensing woes and HDCP (which we can mostly ignore, since we'd not be rendering protected content anyway), but it still needs a bus and a chip, and some mux gubbins to select between an LCD and an external display, if I want to be well behaved.

> Composite and S-Video are pretty dire options for video display;
> you've
> you don't expect video to happen, but neither of these really count
> as
> useful for monitor use these days, do they?


Depends what you mean by 'monitor'. As a viewfinder for a camera, or a doorbell, or an alarm clock, or a java game platform, or a wifi setup screen, or a shelf-edge display, or an ROV status screen, or any of a thousand embedded uses, S-vid is fine. It's cheap, displays for it are cheap. It's reliable, it's well known and understood. It uses a cable that you've got to hand, with no messing around trying to find the correct size version of whatever era HDMI connector the TV shipped with, but without a cable for. Most (All?) TVs you'll encounter have S-Vid or composite in. It can be mated blind, by feel, during a stressed installation. There's very rarely any 'waah, the TV requires and supports only, and exactly, 720i39.7Hz, and will sulk if it doesn't get it.'. Good grief, I hate HDMI. Doubly so where one end is a development system and the other end is consumer tat.
As a boot console of last resort, it's grim but better than nothing. As a huge X desktop, it's wrong.
However, who sees this board driving a huge desktop through HDMI? Why wouldn't you vnc / X your way in through a network connection, or use a spiffy USB-HDMI/DVI widget with a nice thin USB cable?

So: Use cases, please. I don't like it, and I want it gone.

Steve

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