Thanks for all the help mate, got it working, see update.

oh bugger. The results were underwhelming to the say the least. NOTHING happens. I was expecting I might have trouble getting things working right away but I must say I wasn’t expecting literally nothing to happen.

I have the card in the PCIe slot on the chassis, the ATX PSU screwed in place and the cables from the PSU plugged in to the chassis 24 pin and 4 pin slots. I turned on the chassis’ own switch, the PSU’s switch and also plugged the thunderbolt cable in and nothing. No fans whirring, no smell of anything frying, no sound indicating I’d just broken 3 expensive pieces of equipment at once, just nothing. Any ideas? The chassis in question is this thing https://peladn.com/products/graphics-card-docking-station-1 and the PCIe card is this thing https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/decklink/techspecs/W-DLK-32 .

It’s all hooked up like this https://imgur.com/a/nothing-happens-PftKNUk

Thanks so much, this is very encouraging. The eGPU chassis has it’s own little built in power switch. It also has a 24 pin socket that it needs to power itself so hopefully I don’t need to do anything complicated like simulating anything as I’m a little lost by that idea. The power supply itself has a power on/off switch as well.

In the interests of brevity I may have given the wrong idea of the setup. I’m trying to make use of an old Blackmagic Decklink mini-monitor 4k pcie device. I now use a laptop with TB4 ports, rather than the PC this card used to sit it. This card is actually not a GPU, which this eGPU enclosure is supposed to be for, but I’m hoping it will work just the same. It’s a TB4 eGPU chassis that takes an ATX power supply and has a single PCIe 16x slot. The card is actually a 4x slot but I think it should work. Anyway there’s only the one power supply, this old 600w PSU that I’ve cannibalised from my old PC.

The manual, entirely in Chinese and only a couple of pages long, says to connect the enclosure to the PSU and the PSU to the GPU. That’s all. Although even if it were a more rigorous manual I don’t know if they could really provide much guidance here. It’s designed for you to use whatever PSU you want, either ATX or SFX and just hook it up.

I’m just asking because I haven’t done a lot of PC building before and am not familiar with the ins and outs of types of PSU connectors. In this case, I’m unsure why the PSU manufacturer group these 2 connectors together but gave the customer the option to separate them.

I need it to dual purpose as central storage for editing though. That has no chance of working wirelessly. Whether NAS or DAS it’ll have to be connected directly to the lappy to ever work for editing, but the N part of being NAS could be handy for the wireless streaming of compressed media for entertainment purposes. I can do that with DAS and using the laptop as the server part of the operation, but it might prove to be smarter to directly attach a NAS by cable to the lappy for editing and let it connect to wifi itself for serving up media to watch in the rest of the house. In that second scenario I guess I’d have the NAS running jellyfin or emby or whatever and running that NAS 24/7. Just not sure on which arrangement makes more sense and is most efficient and cost effective.

The laptop can definitely handle it, both on paper and in practice in the actual scenario we’re describing as well as for more demanding editing tasks, it does this task absolutely flawlessly as one might expect, I’m just unsure if I want to keep it running 24/7 for the home media streaming hence the possibility of a NAS or your router suggestion. But I can’t picture a router having the resources to handle transcoding or really running much of anything. Granted though, it just serving up files to me without any kind of server software is tempting in it’s simplicity.

hmm. That is an interesting idea. I guess the router wouldn’t have the juice to do anything other than serve up the file though? No running of jellyfin or transcoding on the fly for chromecast or anything like that?

That’s what I was thinking. My biggest home project are only a 1-2 TB max, and most are more in the order of 200-400GB. The type of DAS options I’m thinking of would be RAID systems. I’m fond of the LaCie ones just because of familiarity and relative reliability, but I do think they’re overpriced and they went through a period a few years ago, of a pretty major quality dip. I haven’t dealt with them much since but I think they seemed to have pulled themselves back up from that.

It’s not a major concern that I’d spend a lot of money on, but the idea of self-hosting a little mini home netflix seems fun and I guess for that I’d want things to be always on. Ideally there’d be one piece of hardware for each purpose given it’s a little unprofessional to host my home viewing content on the same storage as professional media, and I guess if the drives are always spinning then they’d wear faster just so they can be ready at a moment’s notice for me to watch TV but I don’t really have the space or money to buy dedicated equipment for each so I’m hoping to dual purpose here. There’s always the option to buy a cheap ‘passport’ drive that’s always connected to the laptop as the ‘media server’ for my jellyfin content and have the laptop be running the jellyfin server as it is now, it’s just, I guess I wondered if that made less sense because I’ll need more editing storage eventually anyway, and maybe running my very expensive laptop 24/7 would cost more in the long run than running a NAS.

I think the trouble is this decklink device is not ejectable. It’s not storage. I can always be sure to power down the laptop before disconnect the enclosure perhaps.

Oh this is an interesting thing I might have missed. So, to be clear, when I want to use this device (thankfully not an all the time thing), I need to turn off the laptop, turn on the enclosure, hook up the laptop then power the laptop on? Is that about right? Or can I connect the enclosure to the laptop at any point laptop on or not, but if I want to physically power off the enclosure then I need to power off the laptop to first?

What typically happens if you don’t follow best practice in these types of situations? Do you physically damage components or just crash the computer? Bit worried about busting my laptop because I did this wrong or a cat brushed a cable or something. Not the end of the world if I break the card or the enclosure I guess, but the laptop would be a painfully expensive lesson.

Nice. I like what I hear. What’s the best way to deal with this hotplugging situation? Power on the enclosure with the device plugged in first and then attach to the lappy via thunderbolt? Or something else? What happens if you mess that up, does anything physically break? Or just a crash that I can reboot from?

One last thing. One of the 2 products I’m looking at, the better of the 2 because it also comes with an m.2 slot and some extra ports, has instructions in a youtube video about connecting power supply cables to the GPU itself as well as the enclosure. My card only consumes 10w of power and doesn’t take external power. If I connect a power supply to the enclosure and plug in the card, it should just draw power from the PCIe slot right?

It was brand new at the time come to think of it, it wasn’t released until 2008 so this more likely happened in 2009. The timing and the dramatic difference from stock to jailbroken is just too striking to have been a coincidence, although you might be alleviating some 15-16 year old guilt, that perhaps it triggered something. Still very worrying that a new and very expensive phone was triggered in to dysfunction from the process but maybe it was unlucky defective model. I definitely think that while it was jailbroken the problems were as a result of the OS but maybe the Cydia apps or something else were particularly draining and then that fast draining cycle triggered something else physically.

This is mostly sounding reassuring. My wanted banking app is on a list of apps that people have successfully used on Graphene OS so it’s probably ok, but yeh, definitely want to be able to go back. I guess I don’t know what answer I’m looking for, but in the anecdote I started this post with, I was amazed that it was somehow possible for changes to somehow survive a re-flashing to stock. I really, really don’t want that to happen.

Wow, they sometimes don’t provide service to a device physically capable just because of the brand? WHY!? Thanks for the heads up

How is that phone by the way? I’m kind of swooned by it but I’m wondering if I really should spend all that money and go to all that effort to have it shipped here when I don’t even do a lot of photography. It just seems so nice, and the bloody pixel and oppo and Samsung phones I can choose here seem so… meh.

ah. That’s interesting I’ll have to see if I can use this same method for determining whether it would work on the Xperia 5V too

My understanding is that we don’t use whitelists here (I’m guessing except for stolen phones) although I only have random internet posts to go on for that as well. What’s the basis on which you say VoLTE is likely. It’s looking likely from the collected internet forum posts and that one youtube video that I’ve seen but I’ve been unable to find anything the least bit official. Even if not straight from the horse’s mouth then at least a very reputable 3rd party like GSM arena but so far no luck. I’ve at least been able to confirm the absence of evidence of VoLTE on GSM arena’s part is not evidence of absence of the feature because of my own personal case confirming that I can get a false negative this way.

Ah, I just put an edit in to my question having guessed that exact thing. That makes sense, hopefully that’s what’s meant. I’d have to be able to find a place where I could import the phone which went in to enough detail to tell me which variant of the model they’re selling.

Well I mean what did you just read? He already said those are the facts bro.

Never got a solution to this, but I eventually uninstalled and reinstalled VLC and it worked a charm, no more networked media in the video tab and my media library preferences actually stick.