I regularly work on servers at home, and, well… They’re loud. And hot. I’d rather not be next to them to work with them. The ever rotating list of servers that I check up on makes the pikvm fantastic. I bought it to solve the problem of ever rotating BMC passwords and needing to reset every one, and it saves a lot of time. My problem isn’t with that, however. It works great. Unfortunately, I have discovered that the other component to my solution is the godawful array of intermittently functional VGA to HDMI adapters. I’m half tempted to just plug it into a vga monitor and point a camera at it attached to the pikvm.
Any other that I read up on have the same issue. Can someone confirm one that works decently that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg? I don’t want to play with EDID, but I am willing to pay up to 100 dollars for a dongle that works.
I use a ATEN VC160A (VGA > DVI) + a passive (DVI > hdmi female) adapter for retrogaming which is given varying and oddball resolution, so it should be more than fine for whatever your server outputs. Costs around 100 Euro. It needs a additional power outlet.
After switching resolution it might blank for 1-2 seconds, though - but is otherwise stable.
Aten has a 2 other solutions: One VGA + Audio input > HDMI converter I haven’t used and one VGA - USB which basically pipes the VGA output into a video stream and it also provides USB-keyboard / mouse input. The later one I used briefly, it had a portable version of a video client directly saved on a mini mass storage partition. (Basically it enables technicians to use the notebook as crash cart)
Its was Aten CV211, but my experience with it was very brief. It relies on the included software. I think there were 3 versions (Windows, Linux, Mac OS) and I think it was Java based, but I cannot say for sure. I dunno if you could decode the display stream with another SW.
