Abstract: An HDMI switch system determines whether or not to make a connection requested by an HDMI sink and whether to send video alerts to the sink based on AV stream format and sink capabilities. To these ends, the switch system includes a metadata abstractor to determine a sink's capabilities from EDID data and to characterize an audio-visual stream. These devices are used to either analyze an existing data stream, or construct a new data stream based on the sink's capabilities.