The interface has changed and for the better.  It’s easier to navigate with 3.1 than the previous version.  I think Google may have hired someone who specializes in User Interface Design, or something.

Chrome seems more stable now, as previously I experienced frequent crashes when using it.

Overall, the system seems more responsive to the keyboard.  Smoother.

The NetFlix app is somewhat different.  Some don’t like it, but I think it’s fine.  It still seems to stream video as well as it ever did.

The star of this show will almost certainly be the ability to load third-party applications.  In addition to getting apps from the Android Market, you can side-load apps.  Simply download the .apk file in Chrome, go to the Downloads App, and then you’ll be able to install it.  If you have some on your PC, you can email them to yourself, and login to webmail to download them, or upload them to your dropbox account, then sign in on the Revue in Chrome and download…

I think we need to give it a bit of time for some more “killer apps” show up.  One current app that is extremely useful is called GTVBox Video Player.  It lets you browse SMB shares and stream media across your LAN.  If you download video files in a format that the Revue can play natively (such as FLV and MP4), this lets you place them in a share and watch them at your liesure.  Oh, did I mention GTVBox also supports AirPlay, so you can stream stuff (including iTunes DRM, I believe) to GTVBox from your iDevice or AirFlick on your Mac.  Best of all, the author seems intent on improving GTVBox, so we’ll probably see lots of other improvements in the near future.

Eventually, perhaps someone will come out with a way to fool Hulu and other websites into thinking you are browsing from a PC…  If they do, that’ll probably be the “Killer app” for the Revue.

Now, you may be worried that buying a Revue at the current fire-sale prices you’ll be stuck with something that’s almost worthless in a year.  It’s true that this is almost certainly the last major update from Logitech…  The newest version of Android, “Ice Cream Sandwich” just came out, about 2 months after the GoogleTV 3.1 update came out.  I doubt we’ll be seeing amazing new GoogleTV boxes from anyone in the next 6 months.  If any new GoogleTV hardware did show up, it would most likely run something very similar to the 3.1 version of GoogleTV now on the Revue and Sony units, since the ICS version of GoogleTV is probably 4-6 months from seeing the light of day.

BONUS:  BestBuy brick & mortar stores seem to have the Logitech accessories on clearance now.  I just picked up the mini keyboard (originally $129) for $49 at my local BestBuy.

The Revue is a pretty solid network streamer now, among its other features, and at the bargain price of only $99, I’d suggest it over the 2nd generation AppleTV and even over the Roku.

After a few days where it didn’t look like anything was happening with the e-gift cards, I got in touch with my bank’s reward center customer service department.  They told me to check my spam folders.

My email is set up this way:  I own my own domain name, so I have the MX record pointing to Google’s mail servers (Google Apps, where they host your domain’s email, etc).  I extensively use Apple products, including iCloud on my iPhone.  Since iCloud has Push email, I prefer to use it instead of connecting directly to gmail periodically to pull new mail.  So, in my GMail settings, I actually forward all my email from my personal domain (going through Google’s GMail service) to my address@me.com, with the original copy going into my GMail Trash folder.  I have both accounts set up on my Mac and iPhone, but generally only pay attention to the iCloud account (since it should contain everything that has filtered through GMail).  The result is that I get the advantage of Google’s excellent Spam filtering capabilities, where all the likely spam ends up in a Junk folder that I can search through, in the event that I miss an important email, and I get the speed of Push email.

Unfortunately, Customer Service couldn’t tell me the email address that the emails would be coming from.  So, I manually looked through tons of spam, but could not find the message with the e-gift cards.  Note:  I checked for Junk on my Mac (I just flag it as junk, it stays in the Inbox) and the Spam folder on my GMail account.  Tons of stuff in GMail’s Spam folder, but nothing related to my gift cards.  Junk in my iCloud was very light (thanks mostly to GMail’s filtering).

As a side note:  I don’t have any rules on my Mac to do anything with incoming mail, except the default Apple News rule.  There are no Filters on my GMail account.

After going back and forth with the customer service center for several more days, they were finally able to tell me the email address it would be coming from.  I searched on my Mac and found it… in my GMail TRASH folder.

After giving it some thought, I can only conclude this:

1. The email made it to GMail.
2. GMail forwarded it to my me.com address.
3. GMail put it in the trash (as it is configured to do after forwarding it).
4. Apple’s servers silently deleted the email.

I can’t say this is 100% what happened, but feel relatively certain because I found three copies of these emails sent at different times over the last week, the first within minutes of the order, the second after a couple of days, and the third after three more days, all of which were in my GMail trash folder.

So, unless Apple has a rogue admin that is collecting these e-gift card emails for personal use, I assume that Apple has some sort of aggressive system in place to block spam (even though it doesn’t have any settings).

If anyone from Apple happens to read this, here’s what the email looks like that was silently dropped.  There’s nothing in the raw headers related to Spam score or anything similar.

————————

—————————

Anyhow, I’ve chosen to essentially stop forwarding from GMail to iCloud and simply use GMail exclusively for now.

If anyone can come up with a good explanation other than the one I’ve mentioned, I’d love to hear it.

But, based on the current capabilities, here’s my review:

Positives:

- Netflix streaming is probably the #1 use for this machine at the moment.  Now that it’s the same price as two other major streamers (mentioned earlier), I think it can probably be said that this is the best streamer of them.  It supports 1080p and has a nice sized keyboard to help you search.  The Netflix interface is very nice, as well, similar to the excellent Roku interface.

- There are several “channels” of content to view, similar to the Roku.  I will say the the Roku has better channel support at the moment, but I could see that swapping, and fast, if Honeycomb ever arrives.

Somewhere between Positive and Negative:

- The Keyboard.  What can I say?  On one hand, it’s big enough that if you want to type something sizable out, you can do it without a problem.  On the other hand, it’s a little big for a remote.  If you can get over the size of it, though, it’s really not bad.  It has some of the capabilities of the Harmony remote series, built right into it.  It’s currently controlling my TV and my SageTV HD200 box via the built-in IR blasters.

- Ok, so you aren’t in love with the keyboard…  Ditch it!  There is a free iPhone app that lets you control your Revue over Wifi.  I think there’s an Android version too.  Yes, the iPhone app communicates via Wifi to the Revue and if you change the volume via the iPhone app, it IR Blasts the TV to change the volume.  It IR Blasts my SageTV HD200 to select the show to watch, pause, fast forward, rewind, or whatever.

Negative:

- Hulu!  You can’t watch it yet, not even the Plus version.

- Chrome Browser:  It’s my opinion that it’s just not the most usable thing right now.  It’s a little on the slow side, somewhat unstable, and if you have an iPad or notebook, you just wouldn’t bother with Chrome on the Revue.  It’s harder to make out text across the room, etc.

- Lack of content:  Everyone with stuff you really want to watch (like the major networks, Hulu, and some others) are blocking video content when played on a Revue.

Potential:

If Honeycomb hits the Revue any time soon (and they’ve been promising for a long time now, so don’t hold your breath), I could see a major turnaround in functionality.  The new version of Chrome is supposed to be more stable, smoother, and faster.  Plus, the Android market should be with Honeycomb, so that’s probably our ticket to sideload something to keep Hulu (and other networks) from realizing that you are watching on a GoogleTV.  If you can do that, you could potentially watch all your TV shows after their original airdate across your Internet connection.  Cut that cable TV cord!

Anyhow, here’s to hoping that there’s a juicy update waiting for me int he next week or two…

Resolution wise, my 24″ ACD was 1920 x 1200 pixels (2,304,000 pixels!), and the 27″ Thunderbolt is 2560 x 1440 (3,686,400 pixels!).  So, while the height of the displays are very close, there are are 240 more lines of pixels and overall there are about 37.5% more pixels!

It’s Huge!  I was used to my 24″ ACD, and while the screen size is only a little larger, it makes a really big difference. With my 24″ ACD, I still felt like I needed a little extra screen real estate.  I don’t really feel that with this display.

16 x 9?  Playing a DVD on my 24″ ACD was a bit odd, as there were black bars above and below the movie.  That won’t be an issue with this unit. I was afraid that the aspect ratio would be a bit odd to work with, but it’s fine.

Ports Galore!  When I was first looking at this display, I thought of the major draw was to have a Thunderbolt port to be able to daisy chain a future device.  It was only after the order that I looked closely and saw the Gigabit port.  At first, I thought I was looking at a picture of the back of a 27″ iMac.  But I wasn’t.  Three USB ports, a Firewall 800 port, and a Gigabit port all carried over the single Thunderbolt cable.  What?  Yes!  Not only is this a nice display, it is a docking station!

Overall:   It’s not inexpensive, but it is very well made and feature rich.  Now if I only had more Thunderbolt devices to daisy chain. 

I didn’t see anything on upgrade pricing…  I logged into my VMware account and found the licensing page.  Just above the table with my licenses was a small yellow window.  It stated that VMware Fusion upgrades would be available the week of 9/19.  Ok, I thought.  I’ll wait.

Tonight, I logged in again.  The yellow box with the statement about Fusion upgrades had been replaced with a similar notice about another VMware product.  Unfortunately, there was still no upgrade button to be found, relating to my existing Fusion 3 licenses.

Then I found it.  This link states that if you bought your Fusion 3 license before Lion was released, you are SOL.  Well, it doesn’t actually say that, but it might as well.  It states:

Customers who purchased VMware Fusion 3 before the OS X Lion availability will need to buy a full license of VMware Fusion 4 to obtain all its new features and enhancements.

What? Haven’t they offered upgrades on every version of Fusion and Workstation in the past? Currently, they offer the upgrade to Workstation 8 half the price of a full license.

The message I’m getting from all this:  VMware doesn’t care about us anymore.

A more reasoned analysis:  Someone at VMware’s parent company (EMC) is probably pressuring VMware to increase their income.  They priced it the same as the upgrade pricing for Parallels for Mac 7.  They probably did this to try to push fence sitters toward VMware.  They didn’t give any love to their loyal customers, though.

What they SHOULD do:  Give existing Fusion 3 customers a discount too.  Perhaps not the $30 discount new customers gets, but at least $25 off.  For a total of $48, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to upgrade my 2 licenses to Fusion 4.

An Alternative:  While it is my opinion that VMware is disrespecting their current customers in a major way, we don’t have to just sit here and take it.  Parallels is offering a competitive upgrade offer that’s very… umm.. competitive.  For only $29, you can upgrade from Fusion to the latest version of Parallels.  If you are interested, here’s a link to save you from having to go to google.

What am I going to do?  I pointed out to VMware their flub on the Fusion upgrade within their own website last week (claiming that upgrades would be available this week), then pointed out the Parallels competitive upgrade offer.  I’m waiting to hear back from them to see if they change their policy, or offer me an upgrade discount.

Why would I do that?  Honesty time.  I’ve tried Parallels before and had issues with it.  Most recently, with Parallels 6, I had multiple crashes on my iMac when running VMs.  I switched to Fusion 3, migrating those VMs over, and the crashes stopped cold.  For me, VMware won on stability.  It doesn’t matter how much faster Parallels claims to run (vs. Fusion), if it won’t stay running.  If VMware won’t fix this, I’ll probably see if Parallels 7 is more stable than 6 was, but I’m hoping that VMware will do the right thing…  Not just for me, but for all Fusion 3 customers.

Update 10/6/2011:  I have just got around to posting it, but within a few days of my complaint email to VMware, they relented and gave me a discount on the upgrade.  I’m still disappointed that they didn’t extend this to all previous customers, though.

To recap the issue:  Whenever a 24″ ACD is attached to a Thunderbolt port, strange issues start.  The screen blacks out for a 1/2 second or so at random, there are graphical glitches, and other snafus.  This may not sound bad, but it’s so amazingly annoying.  I don’t know if you can actually understand how annoying it is, until you’ve experienced it yourself.  Some report only seeing the problem occasionally.  Other reports seem to indicate that the problem gets worse over time.

What I did:  I opened a ticket with Apple about the problem.  Since my 24″ ACD is over 2 years old (and therefore too late for support), I made sure that my engineer understood that the 24″ ACD works fine on my old iMac and on another Mini, and that only when it is combined with my new 2011 Mac Mini does it have problems.  I actually had my 24″ ACD on an older model Mini for about a week after I first experienced the problems with my 2011 Mini.  The engineer went after the 2011 Mini as the problem, which works since it’s still under support.  He went down the path to do a hardware capture on my Mini (send a new machine to replace my “bad” machine).  I knew that wasn’t going to help, but let him go with it.  Before anything was to be shipped, he had me run a program on my Mini to collect data about it, and they sent the data to the engineering department to get approval for the hardware capture.  Initially, it sounded like he expected to hear back quickly, but it actually took almost a week before he heard back.  The time waiting was a bit frustrating as I wasn’t hearing anything back from the tech, even when I was leaving voice mails and sending emails.  I ended up calling in to support again, talking to another tech, before finally hearing back from my original tech with the engineering news.

Newsflash from Engineering:  They are aware of the issue and they don’t want to do a hardware capture, saying they are working on a firmware fix. I was told that there was nothing Apple could do for me.

Beta Firmware rumor:  I mentioned the beta firmware that people have mentioned on the support forum, and was basically told that AppleCare doesn’t have access to beta firmware.  (Perhaps the two people reporting the beta firmware were given it by engineering?  This option wasn’t offered to me.  I’d hate to think they were just trolling, though.)

My reasonable request:  I told the tech that I was very unhappy to have an extremely expensive monitor that was essentially unusable to me.  I wanted the problem to be gone, and I didn’t care if I had to spend a little money to get it that way.  I offered to pay the price difference to upgrade to a 27 inch ACD, as that model isn’t known to have this problem.  He couldn’t authorize that, but he offered to contact Customer Care and discuss the situation with them.  When he called me back, as a good-will gesture, Apple offered to credit me my original purchase price, and allowed me to pay the price difference to upgrade to a newer display.

My result:  Overall, this has been very frustrating, but I think that I’ll ultimately be happy with my end result.  I’ll have a brand new, top-of-the-line 27″ Apple Thunderbolt display for a net cost of about $200, plus the trade-in of ole’ blinky.

Side note:  Until I attached my 24″ ACD to my 2011 Mac Mini, it had been an excellent monitor, easily the best that I’ve owned.  Prior to this, the only issue I’ve had with it has actually been an audio problem when attached to my iMac.  In that case, the audio started getting distorted after several minutes of playing.  When on my 2011 Mini, or another Mini, I never had that problem.

Remember, AppleCare Techs are people too:  They are technically minded telephone support people.  They probably spend hour after hour every day on the phone dealing with fairly common problems.  This problem may be the most interesting one they hear about all day.  You may be awesome enough to disassemble and reassemble an iMac blindfolded with no tools, but don’t try to take the drivers seat in troubleshooting.  If you come across as someone unwilling to listen to their recommendations, they will be less willing to help you.

If you are having the Thunderbolt/24″ ACD blink problem:  My advice is to keep calling Apple and stay friendly.  Be willing to work with them, even if you know what they are suggesting won’t fix the problem (but don’t tell them what you think)!  Be patient with them.  This will probably be a multi-week process.  Don’t try to come off as if you know more than they do (especially if you do)!  After going through the steps they ask of you, and allowing them to come to the conclusion that they can’t fix the problem right now, then you can ask for a concession.  Let them know you are frustrated by the issue and tired of dealing with it, and offer to pay to upgrade to a newer monitor.  They almost certainly will tell you that they can’t, but ask if there is anyone else they can get with about it, like customer relations.  If you’ve worked with the tech in good faith, been friendly about it, and ultimately have a request like that, they are much more likely to try to accommodate you than if you come across as unreasonable, demanding know-it-all.

I picked up the Samsung SE-SO84D Ultra-Slim External DVD Writer (Silver) for just under $40 before shipping.

It’s an extremely small unit, and it pops open just by touching a slightly indented section of the front.  It’s not a slot loader, like the Apple unit, but loads by way of a tray.  It doesn’t have a separate power brick, but a Y USB cable, with two ends to attach to available USB ports.  I attached the middle connector to my 24″ Apple Cinema Display monitor, and it provided enough power for the unit, so I didn’t need to attach the second connector (though I’ve read that some people do end up needing both connectors to power the unit).

Compatibility:  Since I believe Samsung has produced some of the SuperDrives Apple has used in the past, it isn’t a suprise to me to find that the Samsung drive was recognized right away by Mac OS, and (so far) has performed as well as the drive included in any of my previous Macs.

Design:  I’ll put it in a way anyone over 35 should understand…  Apple = Ginger.  Samsung = Mary Ann.  For those under 35, that means the Apple drive is sexier, but the Samsung drive isn’t bad either.

Quality:  This Samsung drive doesn’t seem as sturdy as I’d expect the Apple drive to be, but since I’m not throwing it into a laptop bag to jet around the country, it’s probably plenty sturdy enough for my use.

Noise:  This drive isn’t quiet, but rather very loud when spinning up a disk.  This is another point that I’d expect the Apple drive to win on, but considering my occasional use, I can live with the noise.

Price:  Samsung wins this one, hands down.  You could just about buy 2 of these for the price of one Apple drive.

So, of the 5 criteria I’ve covered, the Apple drive won on three (design, quality, and noise), we had one draw (compatibility), and Samsung won big on one (price).

I’d suggest that anyone looking for an external drive should seriously look at this Samsung unit, especially if it’s destined for only occasional use, and will live on a stationary surface.  For the money, it’s hard to beat.

A few days later, I went to rip another one.  It didn’t work so well.  I’m guessing it had some sort of copy protection on it or something.  A few days later I tried a different DVD and had the same lousy results.

While you may not need an optical drive to install software often, and the Remote Disk feature may work fine for that, there are still other reasons to have a real optical drive…

Anyhow, way down in the comments, SirB posted the most current method that works.  I’m placing it here for posterity, as I’ve just followed it and it worked just fine (though I did not have to do steps 8-10).  The only additional thing I did was set my networking as Bridged, not the default of NAT.  After appearing to work with NAT to start with, I later couldn’t connect to Apple’s update servers as I was trying to update my VM to 10.6.8.

————  The original post follows ————–

KR’ and some findings of my own … Working for an iMac running Lion 10.7.0 and VMware Fusion 3.1.3 as host system.

How to create a virtual Mac OS X 10.6 (“client”) machine using VMware Fusion 3.1.3. These instructions were cobbled together from previous posts with a lot of trial-and-error:

1. Quit VMware Fusion3 if running.
2. Apply the darwin patch as follows in terminal:

sudo bash;

cd “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion”;
tar cvf IsoImages.tar ./isoimages;

cd “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages”;
mkdir original;
mv darwin.iso tools-key.pub *.sig ./original;
perl -n -p -e ‘s/ServerVersion.plist/SystemVersion.plist/g’ < ./original/darwin.iso > ./darwin.iso;
openssl genrsa -out tools-priv.pem 2048;
openssl rsa -in tools-priv.pem -pubout -out tools-key.pub;
openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < darwin.iso > darwin.iso.sig;
for A in *.iso ; do openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < $A > $A.sig ; done;

3. Create a fake Mac OS X Server install disk from a Mac OS X Snow Leopard install disk (retail version) as follows:

————- HINT to read carefully:
————————————–
————- choosing your DVD *DEVICE* in Disk Utility,
————- and *NOT* the CD Image (icon) of the
————- ‘Mac OS X Install DVD’ in the column browser
————- is *CRUCIAL* to making this work

- Insert Mac OS X Snow Leopard install disk into your optical drive.
- Launch Disk Utility, select the device for your optical drive (note that this is NOT the Mac OS X install disk, but rather the device that has mounted it; the device should be named something like “HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GH41N”).
- From Disk Utility’s File menu, choose “New > Disk Image from [device]” from the File menu, set the image format to “DVD/CD master” and create the disk image.
- Mount the new disk image and turn it into a fake Mac OS X Server install disk with the following command in Terminal:

touch “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist”

4. Create a new virtual machine in VMware Fusion. I chose Mac OS X Server 10.6 64-bit as the type, but I suspect any type will work. Select the disk image from step 3 as the OS disk image.

5. Allow VMware Fusion to create your virtual machine and install Mac OS X Server 10.6 (really just your regular version of Mac OS X). After installation completes, the new virtual machine will boot and give you the “guest operating system is not Mac OS X Server” error. Let it shut down and proceed to the next step.

6. Choose “Show Package Contents” on virtual machine file for the machine created in step 4, then edit the vmx config file and change the firmware = “efi” line to firmware = “bios” (commenting this line out will NOT work).

7. Launch VMware Fusion once again and start your virtual machine. You’ll now be prompted by Mac OS X to create your administrator’s account. Have fun with your new Mac OS X virtual machine!

8. I created a VM. I had to edit the .vmx file to show ide0 instead of scsi1 for the CD image. It would not boot from a SCSI cd it said. I had to leave the firmware as “efi” .

9. On Intel iMac enter the “darwin_snow.iso” as boot image file for this virtual Snow Leopard Machine in VMware’s 1st CDROM/DVD config.

10. To Install VMware tools, use VMware menu “Virtual machine”, alternatively mount darwin.iso to the second DVD/CD drive and run the installation. Restart the VM.

11. Finally increase screen resolution.

So, I decided to try something myself, even if it meant I wasted some money:

Atlona AT-DP200 DVI -> Mini-DP adapter  (If you want one, search Amazon, as they have them for about 2/3rds of this price)

I ordered one on Friday with Fedex Saturday delivery.  It arrived this morning, I hooked it up to the DVI output of my HDMI->DVI adapter that came with my Mac Mini, and things seemed to go well…

Everything was working great today until after I installed a memory upgrade on my mac mini late this afternoon (it also arrived today, but via USPS).

Prior to the memory upgrade, I had experienced ZERO screen blanks and ZERO horizontal video shifts for several hours of use, spread out over the day.  Then, while playing Civ V, I started having occasional screen blanks and video shifts, which even continued after I stopped playing Civ (though things seemed slightly better).  Strangely, these screen blanks were different than the original blanks I experienced.  With the original issue, the blanks take place for a second or two, then everything returns to normal until the next random interval.  The ‘new’ screen blanks were longer, and it sometimes seemed to take me doing something (mouse movement, pressing a key, or something) to get the screen to return.  Also notably, the Mini was making a lot of fan noise while playing Civ.

Just to recap the wierdness, original connectivity:
Thunderbolt Port connected directly to 24″ ACD = Random screen blanks (theoretically caused by Thunderbolt compatibilitiy issues)

New connectivity:
HDMI Port -> DVI Adapter -> Atlona Mini-DP adapter -> 24″ ACD = Worked fine for hours, then random screen blanks?

Since the common factor to the problem has been the Thunderbolt port, how can I possibly have similar symptoms when I’m not using that port at all?  It just didn’t make sense, so I started looking at everything a bit closer.

Eureka! (A little tentative here, but promising)

I figured out that the DVI connection to the Atlona wasn’t connected very well.  When I attached it this morning, it didn’t seem to want to go together very far, but perhaps I was just being too gentle with it.  Anyhow, I think that when I moved the mini for the memory upgrade  (pulling it out, flipping it over, unplugging the power, swapping the ram, then putting it all back) loosened the cable a little too much.  There was probably 1/8th of an inch of metal showing between the plastic portions of the connectors, as they weren’t screwed together at all.  The screws on one side didn’t touch the threads on the other!  I’ve now screwed the adapters tightly together.  I figured this out about 30 minutes ago, and haven’t seen any screen blanking since, whereas they had gotten to be pretty common before the connection tightening.

On further thought, the fact that both the Thunderbolt -> 24″ ACD issue and the HDMI -> DVI -> Mini-DP -> 24″ ACD loose connectivity issue have similar symptoms makes sense.  My connection was loose, so the ACD wasn’t always getting a good signal from the DVI port.  I think the vibration from the fan while playing Civ may have also contributed.  The theoretical Thunderbolt > ACD problem may be very similar, except not with a physical loss of connectivity, but a loss related to a protocol or timing issue.

Anyhow, I could be completely wrong, and my display could start blanking any minute.  The most logical thing to do is to continue testing, which I plan to do tomorrow.

UPDATED 7/31:

Alright, today I played Civ V for about 5 hours, and it was perfect the entire time.  Then, I exited the game and soon afterward, the screen blanked.  Perhaps this was related to the video mode switching or something…

Since then, my only other issue has been the screen not waking up once, which was resolved by hitting the Reset button on the Atlona.

While this adapter doesn’t seem 100% ideal, it does seem to have relatively few drawbacks to it.  If I relied on this computer for my income, I think this adapter would be acceptable.

UPDATED 8/28:

Had more strange issues with the Atlona.  Snow (like on an old Analog TV).  Sent it back.  Tried an Kanex C247d next.  It didn’t work as well as the Atlona, giving me screen blanks, etc. within minutes of hooking it up.  Sent it back too.  Working with Apple on a real fix.