I am using a laptop, with a cheaper monitor that only has one hdmi input. I have two devices that I want to use on this monitor, My laptop and my xbox series, so I got an hdmi switcher.
The xbox handles switching to and from it’s input without a hitch, but my laptop can takes up to a minute to recognize the switch and display to the monitor, sometimes not recognizing it at all.
I was thinking that having the laptop continue to output the display whether or not it recognizes the monitor as disconnected would help make switching between them more seamless. Is there a way to achieve this?
I am using KDE and I have the “Do Nothing” option selected under close lid in power options.
You need a KVM with an EDID emulator. HDMI switcher just swaps output ports, while a KVM+EDID emulates device status.
I think what you want is an EDID emulator with passthrough or whatever it’s called. EDID is how a monitor tells a device what resolution to send and other info. Some cheap HDMI splitters, adapters, audio extractors, etc will let you emulate a specific EDID. One of my audio extractors lets you fake stereo vs surround support to trick the source into sending surround - I think that’s also through EDID - since if you’re trying to extract surround, it might be because your real TVs EDID is for stereo I assume. So you probably want something like that in before the switch so that the laptop always thinks something is plugged in. Your switch seems to be too smart in actually passing through the real monitor’s EDID so the laptop is able to see when it switches.
Just use the linux equivalent of https://github.com/VirtualDrivers/Virtual-Display-Driver
When the wayland people stop pretending you don’t need it
in 3 to 5 years, sometime around when they realize that network transparency is really important actually
