Creating and using edid.bin via xorg.conf

Outline
If your machine has a black screen only when you boot it up before TV or AMP, follow this guide.

On some combinations of equipments (AVR/TV/XBMC) in rarer cases you may find that the order you power on your equipment matters. This is obviously inconvenient but can be easily fixed.

The root cause of this issue is the EDID (Extended display identification data) handshake. Xorg may not correctly handshake with AV equipment after boot. Typically this results in a black screen and a full system shut down and restart to rectify.

In this guide we will show you how to trick Xorg into thinking your AV equipment is connected and powered on at all times. This locks on your install to one monitor/AVR (port specific) and should stop all handshake issues.

This example is for a nVidia GPU, other GPUs will have a similar approach but are not covered here.

Introduction
There are other tools for acquiring EDID information from Xorg.0.log, in this page we use a defer to nvidia-xconfig which is reliable and has been reported that the resulting information is more reliable using this tool, even for ATI GPU's.

You'll need:


 * SSH access.
 * Nano installed or your editor of choice.
 * Reading glasses.
 * nvidia-xconfig

You should be running as normal user while following this guide, i.e. not as root Any further references to "root" are meant to be interpreted as base directory not the user.

Generating & using edid.bin
Make sure your install is in a working state, powered on in the correct order so that you can see the GUI.

Extracting EDID binary
Now that all the information is noted and gathered, we can generate the RAW binary edid information to a binary..

Configure xorg to read from EDID
Now edit the xorg.conf you created again and find Section "Device"

Since we have created a new xorg.conf file in a location the OS knows to use as default, no further changes need made to make this permanent. If at a later date you need to undo this work simple rename the config file and reboot to revert to default.

If all has went to plan when you reboot everything will just work and the order of powering equipment up will not matter anymore.

Edid Library
The edid library is intended to be a collection of user generated edid.bin for equipment such as TV's or AVR's in case users want to test or modify or share with others existing edid's. This section is a WIP and will need to be improved on by users.

Use the Legend below as a guide to fill in new entries onto the edid.bin table.

Below is an area that the general community can share their edid.bin and relevant information with other users.

''' Feel free to update and share your experience below. '''

Credits
The edid instructions are adapted from the Openelec wiki, credit to original authors