Quick Start Gaiden, Ep. 1: Alienware's combo laptop/monitor
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2024
- Hey! I found one!
FYI, if you don't see your name in the patron crawl, it's because I finished this video two weeks ago.
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Chapters:
00:00 Premise
00:36 Demo
02:11 Laptop review
07:10 The Big Question
07:49 Technical breakdown
13:27 Issues
16:52 Why no capture?
18:29 The Quick Start connection
22:00 Conclusion
22:43 Outro - Věda a technologie
The gaslighting about the perfect size for a laptop screen will always be hilarious
i didn’t realize that until he started saying every size is the perfect size
@@sylv256 every size except 16"(Dell Z600)
I had one of the Alienware laptops with HDMI IN after picking it up at an auction for way under MSRP. This was not a feature that went unnoticed. I used it basically every single day, as it was the best way for me to connect my PS4 to a high resolution display that I already had available. Seriously, this was the best feature in 2013-2014 besides the RGB that this laptop offered. Being able to set up in my absolutely tiny bedroom (It was literally 25 square feet, barely large enough to fit a twin-sized bed, a dresser, and a small desk) and have a playstation AND a PC was the best thing ever to me.
… how tall were you?
Yeah that math does not really make sense , The bed alone is 18.75 square feet given even small dresser and desk that would be almost 31 sq ft and then just to walk to the bed and have a chair at the desk and enough to open the door into the room would be around 55 sq ft.
@@Minigighe probably meant "literally" figuratively.
i got the point
@MartyrKomplx or he meant square meters.
The end card always reads "Thanks Cathode See You For Watching Ray Dude Next Time" to me.
patreon high cat tier rollers patrons
@voidyt9939no
_spits water at a new perfect size_
~12 sentences later: 'It's a real battleship ... It's not meant to be tucked under your arm and carried.'
I love how the variable "perfect size" for laptops has become such a running joke for this channel
whoa! spoilers!
@@basara7 it gets me every time and I'm here for it
@@basara7this channels "through the magic of buying two of them"
I wonder if part of the reason the HDMI IN didn't get more coverage in reviews is because the kind of person shopping for an Alienware laptop in 2012 likely identified _very strongly_ as being a PC gamer and _not_ a console gamer. Not saying it makes sense, but I could see some reviewers maybe thinking along those lines
It had also appeared on the prior generation, the M17x R3. If you look at reviews for that model, it's featured a bit more prominently. For instance, from Anandtech:
From here there are three fairly sizable selling points for the M17x R3: HDMI in, wireless display, and 3D. The HDMI input is only 1.3 and can't support 3D should you configure the M17x with the 120Hz 3D screen option, but for connecting your PS3 or Xbox 360 it's sufficient and works basically as a passthrough to the laptop screen.
@@ziginox3D screen?!? How have I never heard of that? Was it glasses free 3D like a 3DS or did you need glasses like a 3D TV?
When your daily driver has similar specs to a computer that gets featured on cathode ray dude, you know its time to upgrade.
To be fair, aren't these laptops still pricier than a used Macbook? To be even more fair, I haven't checked 2012 Alienware resale prices in a while though
2012… that's the year _my_ laptop is from! (And yeah, it does have similar specs.)
Meh, of it works for you, then send it. My daily is a year newer than this.
Honestly I would upgrade to this laptop, has better specs than mine.
HDMI-in + 'target-disk mode' are features that every laptop ever ought to support. Because modularity.
JESUS i miss target disk mode
@@seanephram Yeah, like, don't make me open the machine to get access to the drive when it won't boot!
Tl;DR because I had to look it up: Target disk mode allows a laptop to behave like an external hard drive accessable over USB, FireWire, etc.
@@JackieBright Exactly! Was pretty great for transferring files with no network needed!
@@JackieBright Only Firewire and Thunderbolt for an old MB Pro i'm trying to copy the data from. It won't work over USB 2.0 and finding a firewire to USB-C cable is challenging. Have tried adapters with no joy. 3TB of data over the LAN is taking forever. Have also tried to connect the drive directly to the new MB Pro with a Sata to USB-C adapter and it won't recognise the drive.
You should look into what Apple did in the same time period. Their range of unibody iMacs up until about 2014 all supported target display mode, where you plug something into the display port or thunderbolt port on the iMac, hit Command+F2, and away you went. At the time I had a 2011 27" iMac plus a custom built windows PC. The iMac had a 2560x1440p panel which was heavenly to look at, especially for 2011. Games just POPPED on that monitor.
It was never on ANY of their laptops, though. At most you get target *disk* mode to help rescue a borked machine, but that's about it.
I used this trick to have a 2011 iMac 27 inch working as both a standard personal test PC (Mac) as well as a nicer monitor than what my helpdesk job provide to me, and it would switch between monitor mode and Mac mode really fast.
I wanted to see the HDMI out plugged back in to the HDMI in, I know it wouldn't do anything special, but there are so few devices that can do a self-test like that.
Multi desktops on one monitor, probably before windows implemented that? I bet all inputs other than the key combo are disabled or something, though.
I wanted to see that too. It would be dumb and pointless but also entertaining
It's a shame this feature didn't catch on. I would for sure be in the user base who would actually find it useful.
It's fun how nowadays we can just use a capture card via usb-c to use an iPad as a display. We come full circle!
Ohhh Didn’t know you could do that…. Jeez glad i read the comments today. @@AMacProOwner
You never know what you may need when all your monitors some how break at the same time and this is your only option .i had crazier things happen
Literally every AiO PC should feature this, so that the thing doesn't become e-waste the moment the internals become too outdated to keep up with the use case for it. AiO PC's usually have halfway decent displays, so it's such a waste that you can't just turn it into a sorta thiccc monitor when it has outlived its usefulness as a PC.
in a hp all it one i have you can switch to hdmi input it just sucks there is no way to do it without the computer being on
As someone who has developed with LVDS, it has been my experience that it's only used to refer to the display protocol, to differentiate it from the multitude of parallel "standards." I call it "the" protocol because most display protocols are simple enough that they are defined on a case-by case basis in datasheet that basically says "these differential pairs do red, bits 0-5, these ones do green, blue, horizontal sync, vertical sync, etc." I would think of LVDS as a defacto standard that covers the physical layer, but there is basically nothing running on top of it.
I was under the impression that FPD-link was the standard protocol used over LVDS, at least as far as Laptops went. Of course both LVDS and FPD-link have largely been displaced by eDP nowadays, at least for high resolution displays.
@@yukisaitou5004 Interesting. Maybe it's due to not wanting to pay for use of the standard, but I don't remember seeing "FPD-Link" used in the documentation for the ICs I've used that use LVDS. Then again those ICs aren't necessarily for driving laptop displays, so maybe that's why.
I’ve actually heard LVDS get retconned to Low Voltage Display Signaling because of how almost nobody means LVDS as a generic concept when they say LVDS.
The fact that it accepts 1080p inputs but doesn't have a 1080p display isn't too unusual - there were lots of HDTVs sold for many years that could accept a 1080i (and maybe even 1080p) signal, but only had a 1366x768 display. I've actually seen cheap smaller 1080i sets that had an 800x480 display.
Had a set that would take 1080i for a 1366*768 display. Finally died a year or so ago after ~15 years of service.
Yeah that's why VGA output was still useful when this machine came out. VGA lets you run at the TVs native resolution.
omg this triggered a deep memory.
In 2012 I worked at an indie game company developing a game called Bust N Rush that was going to be a pack-in for this series of laptops. The lights on the logo, keyboard, and front speakers are all independently controllable. Alienware had an API so that those lights could be controlled by the game in a way that would be totally unique to Alienware hardware. It was sort of like a rumble pack but with flashing, color changing lights. I was the one who designed and implemented the gameplay reactivity with those lights. I’m not usually a programmer, I’m a composer/sound designer, but the feature just had kinda the same vibes as developing sound feedback so I was tasked with it.
I think I developed it on this exact laptop lol
Oh boy do you manage to hit the nail on the head when it comes to tech / features I find interesting. I always wondered why we could not get a simple HDMI IN on laptops. Even on 'multimedia' laptops.
+1 for Tux avatar
HDMI In on Laptops is a feature that I feel could really go far nowadays. Shame it never caught on.
I love every single episode of this series, to the point where I've watched each episode multiple times. I had a really shitty day today and this video made it so much better. Thank you for doing what you do, you're the best content creator out there IMO.
I still own one of these, bought brand new. It sits on my coffee table and I use it almost every day, just now for basic web browsing. Not once, have I ever used the HDMI input.
I spec'd mine with a 3840QM and an AMD Radeon HD 7970M 2GB. I gamed on it 5 days/week for years while I was on midnights and it was FANtastic, pun intended.
Worth noting, eDP was used for the 120Hz panels in these things. Both plugs are present internally, but my 1080p 60Hz panel just connects to the LVDS port.
Funny that he mentioned the speakers. I just took mine apart to investigate the buzzing I was getting while watching some CZcams videos. Turns out, the tiny translucent silicone surrounds on 3 of the 4 speaker drivers were cracked. I did a bit of microsurgery with some glue and a hobby knife, but the surrounds will almost certainly continue to deteriorate. A shame, since it's tough to justify $50+ for a pair of speaker modules that may do the same thing.
You're like Technology Connections in that I'll watch anything you put out. Thanks for making another video!!
you wouldn't need to convert LVDS to eDP these days, there's a plethora of ICs that go between HDMI and eDP
But what happens if it tries to get a cupcake?
@@niccage6375 what?
I bought this very laptop new in 2012, in beautiful Crimson red with the AMD 7970m GPU which actually aged quite well. I used the laptop as my main rig until 2016 and I was aware of the HDMI IN feature but never actually used it. With that said, I really appreciated - and still do appreciate - the mix of new and old standards/ports/etc. I made big use of the integrated BluRay drive and I even used the VGA port at times to connect a 21" CRT for super-low-latency high-refresh gaming. Believe it or not, I used the eSata port a lot too - it actually came in very handy. I've still got this machine packed-away, in great condition too, and it's nice to see it featured!
Thanks for this video, CRD. I wanted to point out that it's very clear how much more you seem to be enjoying making videos since making it your full time job. The quality has shot up immensely on a channel that was already amazing :)
I'm actually grateful they still include USB 2 ports. I have a webcam that will straight up blue screen the PC if you plug it into USB 3. Only time I've ever heard of that happening though.
Is it a USB 3 camera? If so, it should work just fine if you use a little USB 2 hub or extension cord.
Throw that shit away FFS
@@DiThi it's a USB 2 camera designed for the PlayStation 3. If you Google "PS3 eye camera bsod" you'll see other people with the same issue
Nothing a cheap USB 2.0 extension cable can't solve. All USB 3.0 ports can act as 2.0, because they literally just added more pins for more bandwidth.
@@No-mq5lw it was plugged into one, this board had a separate usb3 controller that required drivers for the ports to work period
Holy shnikes!!!! You'd think a feature like this would be all over the marketing. This is every college kids' dream! In fact, Roku came out with the first streaming stick in 2012. Talk about the ultimate dorm room set up! Heck, it's 2023 and now I am going to have to go on the pursuit and find one of these things. Awesome!!!
Haha putting that right at the end is a good measure of watch time, but You’re gonna get soo many comments asking! Awesome video as usual.
I'd love to see you talk about the Mac target display mode.
Okay this is an awesome channel. The 8bitguy helps gimme my old 70s and 80s pc fix, and your massive amount of content can help me learn more about 90s to 00s computers and software. What an awesome channel I always hoped to find some better documentation on this phase of pc and software stuff as its a period I am developing a fascination for. Thank you so much!
Glad u explained the headphones at the end I was getting big ideas about their purpose!! That's an amazing feature for a laptop and the fact it would've cost a bunch of money to include, I guess you could call it a throwaway gimmick but in 2012 I would've loved the input option. Thanks man..great video.
The laptop screen size joke never gets old haha
Re: the little bit about gaming laptops like this only really being used when you're not at home to use your home gaming rig, and also the "you're not tucking this under your arm and bringing it to the coffee shop" bit, my boyfriend actually uses a big clunkety gaming laptop (might even be an Alienware) for taking notes in all of his college classes and a bunch of other things that are more in the vein of taking it to a cafe to do work on, which I've always thought was really, really funny. He says the fans get kinda loud sometimes too so sometimes I wonder if that ends up being a source of disruption during lectures and whatnot
I feel like this would be crazy useful on thin-and-light ultrabooks and the like. It would be a standout feature for IT people, in particular, since frequently you're left staring at a computer you want to get a desktop on but only have your laptop.
Im a broken record at this point , commenting tbe same thing on every video; your presentation and off the cuff humor are perfect. That throwaway "wow jimmy" referential joke cracked me up.
Love ya
I bought a Dell Inspiron AIO this year with HDMI in. It has a power button for the PC part that activates the panel, and a source select button that works when the PC is off. I got this PC because AIOs are great but having the option to use its screen after the PC gets outdated was a big draw for me.
This would have been a great use for all these older iMacs with retina displays too but ofc course Apple decided to only implement the use of them as a display in a proprietary way that only works on some combinations of iMacs and macbooks over mini displayport or thunderbolt requiring the OS to be running, and ditched it entirely on later models.
@@olnnn from what I know, the 2009 and 2010 models that support target display mode don’t require anything special from the source, they will accept any displayport signal you can throw at them
People have been able to successfully connect PCs to those models, unfortunately it only works with the 2009 and 2010 models
I am thoroughly enjoying this deep dive and I did not know I needed it in my life
Another great Friday. Thanks Dude
Love this channel, whether it's cameras, computer, or video tech. Anything you want to talk about, I'm there! This whole video series has been amazing! I worked in my alma mater's IT dept in the 2010s and this Quick Start kind of weird innovation or laptop sludge was omnipresent in every laptop I serviced. It was a very interesting, interstitial time for tech, wasn't it?
Total sidenote: what bluetooth earphones are those? I didn't think reputable vendors even made the neckband headphone anymore, and I miss them.
The most recent Alienware PC to have this feature was the Alpha "console" mini PC. Both generations had it (I don't know if the AMD version did though). Worked pretty well and on the Alpha it switched quickly.
re: Sound Blaster. It was just a software enhancement for the usual Realtek audio chip on the board. There wasn't any actual Creative hardware on the mainboard. At least that's how it was on my M14xR2. I never owned the m16x.
You're bang on that Dell could have enhanced the feature on a laptop by letting you use the display without the rest of the PC. Great for tiny dorm room desks. I remember tons of college students wished they could use their gaming laptop as a TV back in the late aughts.
Love your videos and especially this series of Quick Start, most likely because I used to have a Dell with MediaDirect, now I have a pavilion DV6700 series but I lost the weird QuickPlay partition, if you encounter one with the partition it could be great if you archive it !!! Keep it up and have a happy new year !!!
Love your channel! No misleading click, and not misleading exploitative garbage to gain subscribers. I has super old tech that I would love to have you review
HDMI IN on a laptop is a feature I saw as a niche. When I did IT repair for 10 years, I always carried around a small monitor for testing desktops or servers or laptops (to see if laptop screen is broken or settings issue). If I had HDMI IN on a laptop, all I'd need is a DP or VGA to HDMI adapter and I wouldn't need to have carried around a screen. For PCMR hardcore gamers, there is no need for HDMI IN because most PCMR hardcore gamers who would have bought a laptop like this would not be caught with a console. Yes, you could hook up a cable box or TV tuner to the HDMI IN, but again, that's an even smaller niche compared to gamers wanting to use their laptop screen directly connected to a console without a capture card.
Remember sound cards in the 90's. There was always a stereo input or two on the card for internal use. Specifically, you would plug your CD-ROM into those inputs and the audio from the CD player function would be passed through to your speakers. This required no software or even drivers other than what might be necessary to control the CD-ROM drive (might is the right word here, since some CD-ROM drives had front-facing hardware playback controls). Usually, anyway. Typically, there was a hardware mixer that mixed the CD-ROM audio with the soundcard audio before output. Usually, at least on the cards I experimented with, this mixer was always on and the gain on the signal from the CD-ROM drive was fixed. That's why your powered speakers had a volume control. They could have easily done something like that. Just throw the hardware mixer before the output amp, add a pre-amp (for volume control) to the HDMI audio and the necessary DACs and a couple of buttons above the keyboard, and now you've got something. It's too bad they didn't just go the extra 10 feet (a hardware mixer, a couple of buttons, a pre-amp, and two DACs aren't a significant cost on a premium system like an Alienware laptop, so it ain't no extra mile).
I see a newer and better linus tech tips in the making. Great work!
I never noticed audio lag using line-in w/'listen to this device" until I was playing Rhythm Heaven and was wondering why I was playing so poorly.
I used to use my PC as an audio input and switch over my monitor input so I could use my computer audio setup w/my Wii U/Switch.
Regarding LVDS and it "not being specific" - it's an entirely specific electrical signalling standard (just like, say, 3.3V CMOS, or 1.8V SSTL, or PECL, etc) which is then used to carry higher level protocols on traces and wires to get it from chip to chip. That's why you can't find a more direct definition of it, because it's only a way of representing 0's and 1's in a conductor on a PCB and has nothing to do with w/e higher level it's carrying. HDMI itself uses a signalling standard called TDMS to get signals from device to device over the HDMI cable. The practical upshot of this is that all that conversion chip is doing is taking TDMS signals in, recovering the underlying bits (undoing the 6b10b encoding and recovering the clock signal from its TDMS receivers; but, note, keeping the HDMI signalling intact otherwise), and then retransmitting the recovered bits to the panel for it to then decode and display.
Oh, huh. So you're saying the panel probably speaks HDMI, just with a different electrical layer?
@@CathodeRayDude Yep, exactly! Edit: It's also a very neat (low effort) way of getting around the HDCP headache and issue that the screen is already having to solve, and means the latency will be just a couple of pixel clock cycles - you can't perceive this, your brain is physically unable to handle the multiple tens of kHz in question perceptually, so functionally this makes it 0 latency.
Bonus, LVDS is a very power efficient way of moving the high bandwidth data stream about too, unlike TMDS which is designed to get the data safely over a long cable.
Still rocking my Alienware M17X R4 as a spare, despite its age its still pretty capable. I would've ditched it awhile ago if it weren't for the MXM slot, with a few driver edits its running a GTX 970M which gave it some good life. But its on its last legs, and I'm extremely happy to have had it for as long as I do (11 years next month). Same CPU, but I opted for the HD7970M and 1080p screen.
I run the standard Dell equivalent, a M6700, with a Quadro M4000M (970M with more memory bandwidth) as my backup
3:28 I almost spit my coffee out, i wasn't expecting the joke lol.
I love the HDMI in like this. We use AIO machines on our work desks as 'web browsers' and when they are too slow and get replaced most of them can be promoted to stream screens/game system displays easily put in a room that might not have a TV in it.
Understandable, have a nice day.
Nowadays, with practically all modern Apple devices and many recent Android phones and tablets being able to enter desktop mode with just a USB-C-to-USB-C cable to a compatible monitor or DP-Alt dock, it would be neat if this feature made a return with a full KVM switching solution reusing the same USB-C port modern laptops already have for charging and peripherals.
If the rest of the machine was kept off, you could have extremely long battery life if your usecase didn't exceed what a Chromebook is capable of that day. You could keep the phone charged with the laptop battery, have a decently polished, fairly flexible and customizable interface that stays updated and you're free to install custom apps to, and have truly instant (2-3 second) boot times, and with a simple DP to USB-C adapter, you could plug any other device to it, too. If properly implemented with an extra splitter and a capture card to allow recording footage (and it'd comply with HDCP requirements if you have the capture card mode fail HDCP on purpose so devices adequately pick up on that and refuse to feed copyrighted content to it) it'd be a pretty awesome feature.
And with phones and tablets also becoming increasingly gaming-capable (you can already emulate Gamecube and PS2 games in realtime on most flagships, heck, many companies like R* have native ports for some of their older games already that run flawless on even the average chinese TV box sludge), this feature would be no joke.
The laptop could also forward its USB ports and I/O to the phone this way.
And when you do need the capabilities of a real x86_64 CPU, you just power the laptop on. It'd be the Dell brainslug idea, done properly.
Then again, we don't have the slow boot problem anymore thanks to SSDs. And if you want your computer up instantly, you can just put it to sleep*, and some laptops still have ass battery life, but most new machines can run a decent 6 hours or so, right? Who needs a 30-hour battery? I'm kidding, of course. I'm willing to learn how to, and then design and solder a modchip to my laptop for this kind of feature.
Commented on the last video about this laptop. Bringing back memories of my teenage years and how damn heavy and clunky this thing was. I carried this thing everywhere all the time 😂
I'm glad I watched to the very end before asking about the fancy neck accessory. My guess was a personal neck fan and/or peltier cooler, necessary because of some ongoing HVAC issues at your house.
I just caught this video. Enjoyed it, thanks. About audio delay, because audio processing is simpler for your brain than video processing it takes less time. So your brain makes you think audio and video are in sync, even though internally they aren’t. The result of this is that most people can tolerate up to 50 ms of A/V sync errors without being aware of it, as long as the error is constant.
the output of this channel lately has been really good! I very much appreciate the faster releases for this series :)
22:04 entirely random tangent, but here's my niche, nerdy BS question: since bidirectional HDMI and DSP ports are a thing, why the hell can't we get dual purpose graphics and capture cards that just allow us to plug in and capture an external device and process the captured footage via hardware!? I've never understood why the big two, now the big three with Intel tossing their hat into the GPU ring, never made any cards or included any specifications to do this with at least their commercial grade cards. It would help cut down on equipment needed to be plugged into, if not be installed in, capture and editing rigs for CZcamsrs, streamers, podcasters, etc. and be a feature for specific cards that would help justify the higher price points and internal PC footprint of such gpus.
I think there's just not enough market that would justify the additional expense. High-bandwidth serial data might be cheaper for large companies like Intel and Nvidia to deal with with their custom silicon, but it's still extra cost.
Ha, that's great that you were able to snag one to show off!
Cool concept. May I ask what the neck thing you wear is?
All the best
I cannot express how excited I am any time I see a new Quick Start video in my notifications.
I'm one of the fifteen percent crew and got notified. Just in case you want to keep track. I like your vids.
Laptops with HDMI input could be also useful if you are working with SBCs like Raspberry Pi on the go, and either you don't want to connect remotely, or when SSH won't connect and want to see what's happening(maybe it's stuck at boot process or kernel panicked).
Sure, you could carry portable monitor or USB capture device, but it would be convenient if laptop you were carrying doubled as portable monitor.
"Even if it's 11yrs late" lol you're a retrospective, that's why we love you.
Had one of these! Was super handy when I needed it, eventually it got very old and stopped holding a charge so I hooked up a fire stick and my mum used it as an extremely inefficient TV for a few years. The couple times I would unplug the HDMI it was just stuck on a BIOS screen with "No bootable disk", served me well that old unit (also have a couple scars from falling asleep with it on top of me)
My first thought would be to use a programmable MStar scaling IC just the same as you find in most monitors. It can do the multiplexing as well, and the audio routing and switching. They did just pile on the things they already had didn't they.
I have seen some creative use for the MStar including in a capture card. Unfortunately they're... a handful to deal with, they definitely went the simpler route here.
Hey dude, I recently acquired my first tube camera. Really digging the look it is giving me with the light trails and the ghosting. I have noticed that the light trails get more pronounced as I turn up the sensitivity/open up the aperture(I think they do the same thing?? There is a sensitivity switch on the side) (testing this just with my phone light swinging around) I was wondering if it is bad for the cameras sensor to be exposed to these bright lights, I know I shouldn’t point the camera at the sun, but what about standard lamps and such? Is the more pronounced the light trail correlated to doing more damage to the sensor? Very curious about all this stuff. Thanks!!
Knowing that you are a fellow Jeremy Parish watcher makes me very happy ❤
Tangentially related as this video reminded me of it: A relative of mine had an HP Touchsmart AIO PC that came around right about this time (I think it had a first gen i7 or later gen C2D and a 600 or 700 series Nvidia GPU?) with a similar setup. Had an HDMI input but it was basically a 'dumb' input like this that went straight to the display. But had a bunch of other media center/'TV replacement' features included out of the box including an analog TV/FM tuner, analog video input (Composite + S-Video. I wish I could recall if these just went to the internal capture card/tuner or if it also had the option to output straight to the display), and an MCE receiver built in accompanying the Win 7 MCE install it came with. Doing a bit of research I'm seeing model numbers of either a 600 series or 9100 series. It was a 23" though. And it was basically designed and marketed from the getgo as a TV replacement but in less portable fashion.
Mad props for the Jeremy Parish shout-out chiron. Respect.
Dell had the same implementation of HDMI In on their desktop AIO models. My Skylake-era Optiplex 7440 AIO can do it, works exactly as you described. The fact you need to have the full PC running in the background to use the monitor is even more annoying there -- I have mine set up as a work PC at my desk, and it sure would be nice to have it as a spare monitor for my personal PC on the same desk without needing Windows chugging along in the background.
This same concept of hardware-based HDMI (or DP) input is also something I've been wishing tablets have had for a decade at this point. I come across so many old Android tablets that just don't have the oomph to be usable anymore but have plenty nice 1080p+ screens in them. Sure would be nice to use these as miniature secondary displays on a PC or with a game console instead of them just being e-waste. Lenovo managed to make like one model, the Yoga Tab 13, that could do this... and it of course was launched during the pandemic with no fanfare and is now unobtanium. I don't often really need a tablet but man it would be an easy buy if it was something I normally used as a monitor and then on the occasions I did want a tablet, just unplug it and boom.
I've got a Gateway all-in-one with this feature. It's an oldie but I use it to display setup & diagnostic screens on cable modems and converters that have their serial number labels missing or unreadable.
And I acquired it at a thrift store for $10 because whoever priced it thought it was just a monitor.
I wish this was a feature common feature. I would have plenty of portable monitors laying around that I can close and easily store.
I love these videos. Thank you for all you do. ❤
I always wanted this feature for lan parties back in the CRT days. I had a laptop, a gaming computer and a headless server. It would be great to use the laptop as a battery powered screen to quickly connect a monitor to the server. It would be awesome to have the laptop as a screen at the lan party or as an extra monitor at home. Didn't know they ever built one, until now. Thanks CRD.
I think LVDS usually refers to essentially a better (differential/balanced) transmission system for the old 'parallel' digital display output that had lines for each bit of each color sample and syncs and pixel clocks and could essentially be converted to VGA with 3 Bourns resistor ladders and maybe some glue-logic if that. This is as opposed to modern 'high-speed-serial' technologies like eDP or DSI which seem to usually use TMDS or similar with one or two lines per color like HDMI/DVI. There seem to be a wide variety of converter chips between digital formats like this. TI for example makes an HDMI transmitter that takes in parallel video like this and has a very short datasheet.
And the latency for these converters is probably on the order of a pixel per chip, not a frame, not a line, a pixel. They just have to switch encodings usually and that means buffering about a single sample of TMDS serial data unless the line encoding packs multiple pixels and their balance bits together for some ungodly reason.
I had a 17x R3 which also had that feature. I think I only used that feature once or twice for the novelty of it. What I do remember though is that it required a Windows driver in order to function at all. It might have just been for the input selector to get a signal from Windows to patch the signal through depending on what was selected through the function keys but it's something I wanted to mention.
With regards to the input resolution - that seems surprisingly common, where a sub-1080 display can actually accept a 1080p signal. I have a Toshiba LCD TV that's 720p (due to being small, it's like 19 inches) and it'll take a 1080p signal just fine. I wonder if this was something built into a lot of these TVs as a compatibility thing since not all devices want to downscale to 720p.
You don't usually see it in monitors, but in TVs it's pretty common. And really, what's the difference anyway? LCDs are LCDs.
I was wondering why my Xbox One would default to 720p when connected to the main TV (even though that TV accepts 1080p inputs)
I've seen 768p a lot in the UK on cheap models such as TCL, Vestel, and Hisense. Thankfully I'm a Linux user and send what I want but consoles and streaming boxes don't like it
I bought an Alienware 17 with dual GTX770s with the bidirectional port. That was the feature that led me to buy that laptop instead of anything else. I didn't have a TV to connect my systems to at the time and I loved having it on the laptop that was already sitting there.
Although unrelated to the Laptop series you have been having and something you may already know; Apple iMacs have had this feature since 2009. I'm not sure of it's implementation but as far as a stack exchange Q&A goes the iMac needs to be running; not sure if this is just a boot process, so the on-board system can switch the display port from out to in, i'm not sure. It's interesting none the less.
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Also. You said about alternative uses for the input! (you mentioned if it was dedicated system on it's own) but did you try and use a Digital SLR, alot have full hdmi and indeed use them for dual display mode if using in a studio? (having a bigger LCD atop the hotshoe) (Forgive the stupidity) but you said about having the soft switching within Windows! mean you could software capture in the input from a digital camera (HDMI) as well as have it connected over usb at the same time? as some pro level cameras could be controled this way, again in a studio setting.
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Just curious what you thoughts were; great videos as always.
God, all the research I made into these is coming back.
I have an m17x R4 and M17 R1 laying around since I upgraded to new laptops and this use never crossed my mind.
I had a falcon northwest laptop with this feature! But the audio had its own program and it would receive and output any of the displays hooked up simultaneously and I could just switch with hot keys which one I wanted to hear regardless of which monitor I was using. Would love to know what quirky way they managed that.
Woo hoo! Dude, I love seeing a new video, especially the longer ones, but I enjoy just your overall style, presentation, depth and humor. This one might be on the shorter side, but I'll take what I can get! ☺️ You make these things fun to dive into! Hope you and your loved ones have a wonderful day! Keep it up young man! 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺🖥️🕹️
I HAD THIS LAPTOP! I wish it still existed because it's really coooool!
We need to bring this back
There used to be a time when Apple iMacs also could be used as external monitors for another computer (via DisplayPort) just like this laptop you showed. Apple called there version of this feature “Target Display Mode”. They first offered 2009/2010 iMac 24” and 27” models. The in 2011 they expanded it to the 20” base model iMac. Apple dropped support for this feature with the 2014 iMac models and with the introduction macOS Big Sur. If one stills has a Target Display Mode compatible iMac, and wanted to try out this feature they need to be running macOS Catalina or earlier on that iMac to use the feature. If using it with a WIntel laptop or desktop PC, it must include a Displayport connection. With Target Display Mode, you switch the iMac between external an internal display modes via the Command-F2 keyboard shortcut.
4:00 I bought my laptop back in 2016, and it had like every other laptop at the time an optical drive. Maybe Macbooks already cut the feature, but they probably disappeared somewhere inbetween to 2016-2020, so a lot later then we think it did
Every video's a fucking banger! 💯💯💯
I always wanted one of those alienwares but iirc it didn't function as I imagined and never sought it out. I know a few models of the Inspiron AIO pcs have a similar HDMI in feature but it's only mentioned briefly in some of the user manuals so tracking down the right model is harder than finding the alienware lol. The 09' and 10' 27" iMacs had similar functionality using minidisplay port (EDP signal processing I think? since changing the GPU to a mDP GPU in a 2011 iMac will restore the mDP TDM signal instead of TB2), the 09/10' iMacs are the only ones that do TDM over Display Port instead of Thunderbolt 2/3. I've been using an 09' as a secondary PC and a main monitor for my windows workstation, it works well and my only real complaint is finding a HDMI to DP active converter for cheap so I can use the iMac as a monitor for my ps5 lol
Back in the early 2010s I got a 24 inch 1080p all-in-one from Medion that was completely based on laptop hardware. It featured a fully offline HDMI in mode including sound. I used it as a monitor for years after the all-in-ones GPU died due to overheat. I also had removed the CPU, RAM etc. I tried to re-route the internal USB wiring for the integrated touch screen to my PC but sadly broke some tiny cables in the process.
Can you make a video about Apple Target Disk Mode and Target Display Mode? And while Target Display Mode was awesome but short lived, Target Disk Mode has been a reliable feature of Macs across generations going from SCSI to Firewire to TB1&2 to TB3&4 and across 3 architectures (PowerPC, Intel, Arm) with 3 different firmwares (OpenBoot, EFI, something proprietary for Arm). I really think these are features all PCs should have had.
Also, the eSATAp port is actually faster than the USB 3.0 port (by just a little). BTW, do any of your devices with eSATAp support supplying 12V power? And do you have any devices with an eSATAp/USB3.0 combo port? I know the connector exists because I have one but I have never seen it on any device.
I really loved eSATAp at the time. Especially together with USM drives (Seagate, Orico, and others).
Finally!!! The amount of energy I've wasted at work having to carry a laptop and screen and worrying about dropping either. Shame on everyone else that doesn't implement video in on anything with a decent display.
I have and still use this alienware laptop! It gets super hot. Weighs more then you actually think. the keyboard is fantastic!! The RGB is great in the whole device. It also has the perfect screen size. I don't think they should make a screen any smaller.
This reminded me of my ThinkPad 770 with build in capture card from 1997. Now, its not what we would consider a capture card today displaying full fps video or anything like that but it could take from your input and save them to disk. Used it for a short period to capture screenshots of my PSOv2 finds with friends of mine back in the day and a few times when posting about a game on forums. Fond memories 🥹
As for this I'd love to have it or something like it but newer for my collection. Being able to write code for my PS3, copy it to the console and quickly switch over to it without the need of a second screen in my small room would be awesome. A modern iteration having it work similar but before getting to the display having a splitter take a second output into a capture card would be game changing as well as the option of displaying through the HDMI output as well as the integrated monitor. Or even being able to use the computer on one screen while displaying the input on another.
This feature is something I really wanted when I was at uni.
@cathoderaydude what does the system do if you’re using the hdmi in AND running an external display via any of the available outputs? Also, should it go without saying that this hdmi-in feature would only function using Windows? Does the hdmi-in toggle require Dell’s drivers being installed?
I bet the audio issues could be partially solved with Voicemeter. If that PC has a sound blaster. It's likely to have ASIO I/O. So routing audio through voicemeter would have next to no latency, with the added benefit of being able to fully control the audio path, muting, and processing.
Same way video-in worked on a select line of iMac's. Full power consumption while the input is used. On top of that it was very non-standard and only worked with some equipment that output DisplayPort.
"[...] They also put food on my tank and gas in my table, so I really couldn't do this without them."
I bought the 18 inch version of this laptop back when it was new and still have it. I remember trying the HDMI in once or twice for my console and ultimately going meh since I had a tv and I wasn't really interested in console gaming on the go. I can't remember if this model had the IR receiver in the front or not for Mediacenter or if it had been removed by this point. I also had a m17xr2 at one point which did. I honestly regret buying the m18xr2, got it because I wanted to do the 2 gpu thing, but dual 680m had so much stuttering while running SLI that it made a horrible gaming experience. But I can confirm, the speakers on the m18xr2 weren't much better, they had a subwoofer in the battery that didn't sound great, and the mids and the highs were completely drown out by it.
now that things like dex are more common, it would be super cool to see this resurrected with a type c port and internal kvm
it is literally what I'd use it for if I were a studend living in a dorm! It's an amazing feature! I was using an VGA adapter and an old 4:3 LCD with my x360 hahaha
Thanks Gravis ❤️
Afaik, many, many, maybe most business executives got to choose what laptop they wanted for the business *and* chose a gaming laptop, but since IT might have minimum requirements, a laptop with a VGA-port to fit those old projectors in conference rooms was probably a must if you wanted to catch that audience. VGA only support in conference rooms was still a common thing in 2017'ish, maybe later too.
Lol. Bluetooth headphones.
Do I notice a bit of slowing down in output?
Always looking forward to seeing you and your stuff Dude. Keep it up. Cheers X fan in East London.