Originally Posted By: boxer
Quote:
I was able to get rid of an HDMI switch (which caused a great deal of annoyance), and several cables.

Are these things known to be iffy? I've been wrestling with one over the Christmas period: The supplier says it's the quality of my cables, but they're all ones which have worked satisfactorily 'till I put the switch in the circuit.

The switch did a satisfactory job but was not great. It was a cheapo switch from Monoprice. Here's the bullet points of the issues I had with it:
  • I don't know what it was doing to the audio streams it took in, but my TV was constantly giving me this error message of "unknown audio stream" or something like that. It's not a big deal because I don't want my TV to handle the audio, but I do want it to ignore it, not get confused by it. This isn't happening to me anymore.
  • I also had problems getting the right audio settings on my bluray player. Some configs would result in no dialog track, others with sound that would cut in and out constantly. I can't say it was the switch and not my outdated receiver, but I think it wasn't a problem when I was connected to the receiver directly for audio.
  • Scenario: I watched TV last night, powered down my home theater, and this morning I want to watch TV again. The macro on my remote is essentially just turning things on to the state they were in before, but for some reason when I did that the switch wouldn't deliver it's output and I'd just get a black screen with no audio. I had to toggle it to another input and back, and then it would display properly. Eventually I just had to add two steps in all the macros on my remote to advance the switch to whatever the next input was, then switch to the input I wanted.
  • One day I wanted to watch Netflix streaming on my Tivo. I played a movie, but there was no video (I think there may have been audio, I'm not sure). After a few hours on the phone with Tivo and Netflix (who couldn't help) and a few hours on the web, I finally found out that some of these switches simply crap out on the DHCP. Simply power cycling the switch was enough to fix it, but that was a big annoyance.
  • Lastly, and I'm sure this was limited to my particular switch, but for some reason whoever built it decided to put what I can only imagine was the brightest LED they could source. This thing was blinding me from the couch. Even worse, it was this purplish color. Eventually I just covered it with electrical tape.
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Matt