I have the following setup:
- quad core mini pc (rikomagic v5)
- custom android app using an android webview to show a website
- rather old non working dell monitor supporting hdmi
- working tv monitor surely supporting newer hdmi standards
The story:
The mini pc is connected to a monitor via HDMI. The weird thing is that my Dell PC monitor causes a youtube video loaded in the webview to playback as either complete unviewable with only green artefacts on the whole screen or red and blue colors exchanged depending on the user agent i choose for the webview. Whereas a colleague of mine told me that he tried the mini pc at home on his tv monitor and the video worked like a charm (without toying around with user agent - its working out of the box).
So i have a setup which is working depending on the hdmi monitor connected. I never thought much about hdmi, but my impression was, that the youtube website reads the encoded video from the server (e.g. some mp4 with h264 codec or such) and uses html5 (a software component) to view the video. So in the end i thought the video goes to maybe some hardware decoder on the mini pc or is done by plain software decoder.
At this point i thought the decoded video is merged into the mini pc graphics card buffer or such, and the result is streamed via hdmi to the monitor. Which means i thought that hdmi just receives by specification (which i dont know anything about) some video stream in a hdmi specific encoded format.
The question:
So my question is if its possible to send e.g. h264 directly via hdmi to a monitor and it just works, depending on the monitor surely. But is this possible? Or to ask it differently, how can it be that, the software side doesnt seem to work on an rather old Dell monitor but hdmi supported, but suddenly works on a new tv monitor also just connected via hdmi without touching the software at all? I thought that the devices connected to some kind of hdmi monitor need to be able to understand the needed video codecs and not the monitor itself which i thought is just stupid to playback some specification based stream.