I tried a whole lot of things to get my steam deck connected via HDMI to my tv.

  • unplug dock from power, plug in steam deck, plug dock into power, unplug HDMI, restart deck, sleep the deck, full power cycle the deck, update the deck, update the dock firmware, turned the tv of/on, and every other permutation of the above steps.
  • I tested the dock on my Samsung phone. It works perfectly in any scenario.
  • I got a 100w power block
  • I read through and tried everything in the support article for connecting the dock to HDMI

Right now, the steam deck appears to detect the tv, because the deck screen will turn off when plugged in. However, the screen only shows a black image. I can tell it’s just getting black because I can see the backlight of the tv still on. I’m pretty sure the problem is in the game mode of the steam os, because HDMI works perfectly in desktop mode. Factory resetting is not an option, because I’d rather not connect to the TV than have to go through setting up all of my non-steam games again.

It’s unclear which version of HDMI it is. I’ve tried four different cables, all with the same result. What’s weird is that I was at first just messing with it because my wireless controllers were dropping out. My steam deck was previously outputting HDMI fine. I think I did an update or something that led to this. Keep in mind that the HDMI also works during desktop mode, so I really don’t see how the cable could possibly be the problem here. I also doubt that out of these 4 cables, none of them meet the standard. They work with anything else.

    • not_particularyOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I had to memorize the controls to disable automatic resolution while the steam deck was plugged in.

  • not_particularyOPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Solved!

    I had to memorize the controls to enable automatic resolution while the steam deck was plugged in. Looks like the steam deck has a different settings profile for each display that I use. When I was messing with settings previously, I must have set a resolution that was incompatible with the tv. When I changed the setting on a (different) display that worked, the change didn’t effect my original tv. The tv wouldn’t work anymore with my deck, though, so I had to plug it in and go to reverse my change from memory.