Steam dock temporary loses hdmi connection

[GokartMozart96]

Hey there,

as I am quite new to the steam deck and docking station I've seen one big issue which always occures during my gaming sessions..

Once in a while (like every ten-twenty minutes) my dock is losing the hdmi connection to my TV which really sucks. Got that no signal screen for approx 5 seconds and then getting my screen back which sucks especially during boss battles..

Already tried a different hdmi cable but the problem persists..

Anyone had the same issue? Must be the dock right? Any better docks than the original one?

P.S.: when losing the connection for these moments the steam deck insde the dock remains black

[BowieD]

I have the same issue, I don't have any idea what may be causing this. Sometimes it drops for about 5 seconds (just like in your case), and sometimes it won't recover until I replug it in. Steam Deck does not turn on its screen during this. TV reports "No video signal".

[iChroniCx]

I'm getting the same issue and even when I'm in desktop mode and watching youtube videos.

I'm looking for a fix but none yet :/

[iChroniCx]

Okay, so I found a temporary fix. Not the greatest depending on what you're doing but it just worked for me.

So far I've only tested it with a youtube video and my screen did not flicker on and off (external through HDMI)

Here's what I just did:

Go into desktop mode (Hold power button, choose desktop mode)
Once loaded, on the bottom right on the task bar, left click the speaker icon
Ensure that devices is the one that is selected on the top of the audio screen
Click "Speaker" instead of the HDMI one.

Like I said, so far it's worked for me on my test and it really depends on what you are using it for. I'm not in gaming mode so I don't know if that will effect it or not but its worth a shot. The con of this is that the audio will play through the steam deck itself instead of the HDMI device.

[Emerald edge]

Anyone figured anything else that works, fine on my TV but exact issue as above on another TV for seemingly no reason.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Emerald edge:

Anyone figured anything else that works, fine on my TV but exact issue as above on another TV for seemingly no reason.

Just buggy code. HDMI became a lot crappier because they decided to NDA everything for no reason. The standard is so locked down. HDMI group decided to block AMD from merging HDMI 2.1 support.

With the rise of chromecast and streaming apps, I would not be surprised at the proliferation of badly tested TV firmware.

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-interface/

[deaddoof]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

HDMI is doing the doing the opposite of code quality. You always want more coverage and eyes, but NDA. They are pretty guarantee all TV will always have bugs and there will be a not working matrix between setup boxes and TV.

HDMI ethernet and CEC which are talkative protocol is turning out to be a giant mess.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30870549

irst, I have to plead guilty: my own product's CEC still has many "simple" flaws.

That being said, I indeed have the feeling that CEC is specifically badly implemented by most people.

I feel like the standard is rather under-specified (or there are things I don't understand), like it's said how some kind of devices are supposed to behave based on some commands, but no explanation as to how other devices are supposed to behave on those commands.

For instance, it is specified that a Player (there are various types of devices in CEC, more on that later) can send an AVR (which is different kind of CEC device, there can only be one in the whole network) volume commands. More specifically, a Player can send an AVR VOL+ and VOL- key presses to change volume. What happens if you send VOL+/VOL- to a TV? That's not specified until 2016 with CEC 2.0. So you can't control volume on most TVs if you don't have an AVR.

The number of "slots" available per device kind is constant: exactly one TV, exactly one AVR three players, 4 tuners, 3 recorders. You have a tvbox, and three game consoles (all shold be Players)? Well someone will have to lie and become a tuner or a recorder, or they won't be allowed on the bus.

Another thing that makes this messy, is that CEC needs to fit in small power budget during suspend. For instance, in Europe, the legal power budget in sleep is 0.5W. This means that your main application processor can't handle CEC in suspend. Usually, this leads to multiple "concurrent" CEC stacks, running in different CPUs, switching from always-on Cortex-M, to full-blown Cortex-A (and then you add Android TV on top of that with its own CEC stack, and you get three CEC stacks co-working together). Often the communication pipeline between those people is pretty light, and going through all those layers, you might end up losing the info of whether the wakeup instruction came from your remote (so you legit want to have the TV wake to you), or from CEC (so you want to let TV decide of the output).

I believe one gigantic factor is that CEC has started very poorly (no matter the reason), and since then, interoperability problem has been considered by most QA as "yeah well, this is life"

Back specifically to your question "I.E. "one touch play" turning on unintended devices in addition to your display and receiver.": This is very very usual. I don't know what the specs say precisely, on the matter, but here's what I witnessed on many TVs (many enough that I expect this to be the standard, but it's possible it's related to what I said earlier about dual-stack):

- Say you have HDMI1 and HDMI3 devices connected, you suspended TV on HDMI1, you wakeup from HDMI 3.

1) On wakeup, TV sends Set Stream Path to the previously selected device. If you suspended your TV on HDMI1, and you're waking up from HDMI 3, TV will start with a Set Stream Path to say "hey, the screen I'm currently displaying is HDMI 1".

2) HDMI1 device listens, and wakes up. In the process of waking up, it needs to tell the TV it is ready with ACTIVE_SOURCE command, so they do.

3) If HDMI3 is in the "clever" range, HDMI3 will send again "Please TV switch to HDMI 3" with ACTIVE_SOURCE

4) Even if HDMI3 isn't in the "clever" range, TV will later send Set Stream Path to HDMI3, because it remembered HDMI3's command to wake up to them, or because of thanks to -3-

5) Everyone's happy, TV's on HDMI 3

6) Message sent in -2- finally manages to reach the bus more than one full second later, because HDMI1 is less aggressive on CEC bus than the other.

... And there you go, TV switches back to HDMI 1.

Fixing this is possible, HDMI 1 "just" needs to cancel -2- when seeing -3- or -4-, but most CEC implementation's send_pkt doesn't include cancellation signals. So, it's possible to make better CEC implementations (though it requires mechanism that are pretty complicated for an embedded world), but I don't think it's possible to make a perfect implementation that will never miss.

-- phh

You are talking about the one of the most legal happy trade groups in the world. I am more surprised anything works at all rather than why everything is crap.

[Sreg]

Has anyone come up with a fix?

I see the same issue, where after ~20 minutes the hdmi connection can drop for a second a few times, then the signal tends to stop entirely, and I need to get up and un-connect and re-connect the steamdeck.

I've changed my TV and the HTML cable from the dock to the TV, with no affect. I have not changed my dock (a third party one) based on the problem being found in the original dock above (I assume the steam dock?). I'm guessing the problem is with the steam deck itself. I certainly don't feel like splashing more money to try fix this problem with equipment at this point.

The problem also seems to settle down after a while, but it can re-occur again.

I'm also cross posting this to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1622

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Sreg:

Has anyone come up with a fix?

I see the same issue, where after ~20 minutes the hdmi connection can drop for a second a few times, then the signal tends to stop entirely, and I need to get up and un-connect and re-connect the steamdeck.

I've changed my TV and the HTML cable from the dock to the TV, with no affect. I have not changed my dock (a third party one) based on the problem being found in the original dock above (I assume the steam dock?). I'm guessing the problem is with the steam deck itself. I certainly don't feel like splashing more money to try fix this problem with equipment at this point.

Can you list your TV and third party dock? Nobody can figure out your issue when you do not list your setup. What hardware are you using?

[Curried-Cat]

Is your TV screen going to sleep?

[IGYCRCTL]

I've been running into this same issue when using the steam dock with my LG OLED55B8PUA.

It only happen when running more demanding games.

Using a different power adapter seems to be helping.

[Sreg]

The dock I'm using is a "BOTEWO Steam Deck Docking Station: 6-in-1 Aluminium USB Rog Ally Dock - Switch Dock with HDMI 4K 60Hz, LAN Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 3.0 Ports, PD 100 W Fast Charging"

https://www.amazon.de/Steam-Deck-Docking-Station-Schnellaufladen/dp/B0CSSX8TJ9

The original TV I used was a Samsung from ~2007. When this issue occurred I was inclined to think the TV was showing it's age. So I bought a TCL TV. In this case a "40SF540K 40-inch Full HD Fire TV VVKGA1L"

https://www.very.ie/tcl-40sf540k-40-inch-full-hd-fire-tv/1600970584.prd

The issue re-occurred on the first usage.

The game I'm currently playing is Dave The Diver, where it occurs every session. I've also seen it on Red Dead Redemption 2 and 20XX.

Neither of the TV screens were going to sleep. I recently timed how long it took the issue to re-occur. i.e, After unplugging and re-plugging the steam deck. The first occurrence was after 45 seconds. The second was after ~2 minutes. It tends to be random.

I've also found that sometimes it takes 2-3 re-connects before the signal starts again.

It's a nuisance of an issue, in short.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Sreg:

The dock I'm using is a "BOTEWO Steam Deck Docking Station: 6-in-1 Aluminium USB Rog Ally Dock - Switch Dock with HDMI 4K 60Hz, LAN Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 3.0 Ports, PD 100 W Fast Charging"

Ooooopppf. You are listed your first problem. There are significant differences between docking stations in terms of software. I buy official dock due to Valve ;s long term software commitment.

https://www.amazon.de/Steam-Deck-Docking-Station-Schnellaufladen/dp/B0CSSX8TJ9

The original TV I used was a Samsung from ~2007. When this issue occurred I was inclined to think the TV was showing it's age. So I bought a TCL TV. In this case a "40SF540K 40-inch Full HD Fire TV VVKGA1L"

https://www.very.ie/tcl-40sf540k-40-inch-full-hd-fire-tv/1600970584.prd

TCL is a major manufacturer.... All major manufacturer have terrible software quality. LG might be better than the rest, but they are all terrible.

The issue re-occurred on the first usage.

The game I'm currently playing is Dave The Diver, where it occurs every session. I've also seen it on Red Dead Redemption 2 and 20XX.

Neither of the TV screens were going to sleep. I recently timed how long it took the issue to re-occur. i.e, After unplugging and re-plugging the steam deck. The first occurrence was after 45 seconds. The second was after ~2 minutes. It tends to be random.

I've also found that sometimes it takes 2-3 re-connects before the signal starts again.

What other devices are connected to the TV? The TV have bus limits.

It's a nuisance of an issue, in short.

Power bugs are the reason why I want the entire industry to FOSS their firmware. If your firmware is closed, it will be automatically considered crap.

Vendors should be able to explain their firmware to another engineer and they can reimplement it without looking at the vendor code. If not, I will assume the IHV is full crap and cannot make good firmware.

[Sreg]

I started to experiment with the dock when the No Signal happened, and found that twisting the cable from the dock to the deck caused the signal to return. That made me think it truly was a dock problem. So I made the plunge and bought a JSAUX 6-in-1 Docking Station. i.e. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/dp/B0B8NFC7RF?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

From the first usage there was no issue. So this was a dock problem all along.

[iBaoLi™]

I’m experiencing a similar issue with my Steam Deck. In my case, the monitor loses HDMI signal whenever a Linux system notification pops up—whether it’s an external drive disconnecting, a warning about low drive capacity, or something else. The monitor goes black for about 5 seconds. I’ve tried disabling as many notifications as possible in the desktop settings, which has helped, but it hasn’t completely solved the problem. The frequency has decreased from every couple of hours to about once every 4-5 hours.

I’m confident this is a Steam Deck/Linux issue as I’ve tested it with three different monitors (LG 27, Ultrasharp 34, Asus24) with 3 different hdmi cables, I also tested this on dock’s DP port, all came back with the same result. However, I can’t entirely rule out a faulty Steam Deck dock as a contributing factor.

Would be good if there’s an update/solution to this annoying issue.

[spardante]

I had nothing but issues with the official $80 Steam Deck Dock. I returned mine and bout the cheap JSAUX dock last year. Much more consistent for a fraction of the price.

That being said, the docked experience needs significant improvement from Valve overall. As it stands, it is not great, even with a better dock. The input lag is horrible, various features stop working (like I couldn't get 2 bluetooth controllers to work at the same time when docked), etc. I was really wanting a switch-like experience, but it's nowhere near the Nintendo Switch.