External TV Keeps Disconnecting

[papagaio1001]

Hi, I have recently installed Sonoma 14.5 (23F79) on my Late 2013 iMac (14,4). I have an external TV (FUJICOM 32″ LED TV, Model: FJ-32X400, with native resolution: 1366×768) connected to my iMac via an Apple original Thunderbolt to HDMI cable. Since the OCLP install of Sonoma (from Catalina) to my iMac, I started to have small disconnects between my iMac and the TV. Initially it was for few seconds at a time, usually in the morning when i start working on my iMac. Now it looses connection entirely as soon as I wake my iMac up in the morning (just press any key on the keyboard to wake it up). I need to restart it several times, plug and unplug the cable, try switching from HDMI1 to HDMI2 on the TV, and eventually I can get it to work, but its super frustrating as I never had this before.

Any idea whats going on here and how I can fix this?

BTW, after the Sonoma install, I had issue with fuzzy font on my TV, I installed Better Display, which made the iMac built in display super sharp and made some (but not great) improvement on the TV. Since I started having this disconnect issues with the TV, I removed Better Display, as part of the troubleshooting, and seems that font is now not too bad on both displays.. strange.. (I did not install Better Display back).

[waydabber]

This might be a connection/hardware issue.

BetterDisplay by default won't remove configuration changes that improve display scaling when you uninstall it, however these changes do not affect the connection so it's safe to have them on. If you want a thorough uninstall, you can follow this:

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/wiki/Safe-mode,-app-reset,-app-removal#exhaustive-reset

[papagaio1001]

Thanks waydabber, although I'm not convinced its an hardware issue, as before upgrading to Sonoma via OCLP I never had such issues.
Last night I've set "Turn display off when inactive" to "Never", just to check what happens if the displays do not turn off over night. When I got up in the morning, and hit any key on the keyboard to come out of the screen saver, both displays light up immediately and there were no disconnect issues at all. So something happens when the displays turn off and then go back up?

Also, when I then went to my web browse (Brave) I got this on the external TV:

You can see all the tabs were open, and I could switch from one to another, but all showed this weird display without any content..
When I switched Brave off and back on - it all came back to normal.

Any advice?
Thanks

[waydabber]

I see. Well, the Brave issue seems to be an app/software specific one, maybe Brave support can help with that?

Regarding an OCLP Sonoma install, some issues might be expected - Sonoma does not contain proper video drivers for this Mac model so the patcher uses some legacy drivers and make them work on Sonoma, but it might not wok 100%. Maybe there is some model specific discussion on this at the Hackintosh community?

[papagaio1001]

It seems that it was a faulty Thunderbolt to HDMI cable.. I was using the same original Apple cable for years, barely moving the cable at all, and yet since I replaced the cable with another spare one that I had I have no disconnect issues any more!!

In any case, thanks for the help and advice!

[waydabber]

Nice, happy to see the issue resolved! :)