We really need to just force all standards organizations to release their standards for free. No making you pay $300 or whatever for a standard. (The PCI SIG makes you pay like $5000 for access to the PCIe standard...)
It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.
Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.
Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee.
Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.
The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results.
If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents.
Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now.
The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own.
The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures.
In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
Most of the development costs are recouped through licenses on the base-stations and somewhat on the very low patent licenses per chip/device, not the price of access to the standard.
Back to the the HDMI standard, the licensing fee has already been paid by the hardware manufacturer. Restricting software is unnecessary, as the patent license fees have already been collected on the device.
Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I would think that making a standard freely available (and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues) would make the standard be adopted far more universally than putting up weird barriers to even access the standard.
I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
It's about time somebody does some reverse engineering and just uploads the needed stuff online to make HDMI 2.1 work in Linux. It's getting absurd at this point. TV's need to start including Displayport, HDMI is a giant pain in the ass for gamers.
Yes and no. HDMI CEC works pretty decent these days, all the kinks have been worked out over the years and the only time it bugs out is if you use Chinese brands (looking at you, TCL) that write horrid firmware and never fix any bugs found after release.
Displayport has DDC/CI, which allows you to adjust things like brightness, volume, etc. remotely. This has existed since the DVI era (!) which means Displayport has a huge headstart. But they never formalized and enforced the DDC/CI spec, which means every monitor has extremely weird quirks. Some will allow you to send and read data. Some will only allow you to send data and crash when you try to read. Some will update only once every few seconds.
Although in this specific case, one wonders why Valve didn't just use two Displayport 1.4 ports and and stuck an onboard HDMI converter in front of one of them, sourced from a company that would be amenable to having Valve work on the firmware of said converter. Make the entire firmware of the converter open source except for the binary blob that handles the Displayport 1.4 -> HDMI 2.1 bits.
Hopefully Valve does this but sells it as a external, high quality converter. It would be a nice little plus even for non-Steam Machine owners, same way like Apple's USB-C to 3.5mm convertor is the highest quality mini DAC on the market for the low price of €10.
Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.
Am I understanding correctly that the underlying issue is asking exorbitant prices to see the HDMI Forum’s specs? Feels like you shouldn’t be able to define an industry spec if you want to get paid for it, but maybe that would suppress smaller-scale, niche development.
No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.
Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).
Yes, that might work. Strictly, HDMI is a registered trademark that might have strings but you could always say something like EIA/CEA-861... compatible instead
trademark doesn't cover descriptive language. saying it is an HDMI port is trademarked. Saying it is compatible with HDMI cables and displays is a purely descriptive statement.
HDMI is patent-encumbered. The original specification has lost patent protection, but VRR and the other bits which form HDMI 2.1 and 2.2 are still protected as part of the Forum's patent pool. You could certainly try and upstream an infringing implementation into the kernel, but no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.
> no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.
In some jurisdictions, yes; however, some would probably still distribute it anyway, on purpose or not. I doubt all of them would get sued either, since lawsuits are expensive and difficult.
From my perspective, the objective is to make enforcement impractical.
What would the legal repercussions be against an anonymous coder who donated the code to multiple code forges? Action against the code forges themselves? I mean, not like they would be able to find the guy.
Yes, that. I think you're only allowed to claim support/compliance if you're certified. And that, allegedly, means they run a couple of closed source tests and involves paperwork and NDAs.
It wouldn’t be HDMI 2.1 because it couldn’t be certified. And if you claimed it was 2.1 I imagine they would sue you.
Could it actually be made? I kind of wonder that. Like if one of the things you have to do is claim to the other device that you’re 2.1 would that get you in trouble? Or if you just advertise all the features and they each work is that good enough?
They could just say "we believe we're compliant with HDMI 2.1 but are not officially certified". No lies, no claims they can't make, and nothing I can see that would introduce legal risk to folks unless there's some patent encumbered garbage in the spec.
generally if something is needed for interoperability the courts only accept patents as a way to protected it (patents have a limited lifespan). However the law gets really complex and you need a lawyer for legal advice.
I think in this case you still couldn't claim it was certified. It would be on users to discover that if they plug an HDMI capable screen into that HDMI shaped port on your widget device, things just work and video shows up as expected
Note that if the protocol itself only works if the device claims certification you may be able to claim certification in the protocol. However you couldn't claim certification in marketing or any other context except where things wouldn't work if you were not certified.
In general to avoid IP legal problems in the USA you can't do all of that yourself. Generally one party has to do all of the reverse engineering and write a specification based on that. Then another party can take that specification and write a "clean room" implementation.
Are there examples where a single person doing it gets successfully sued? It could just be that those companies were extra risk adverse so they came up with monetarily inefficient ways to defend themselves.
I think we’re waiting for the courts to deem LLMs able to sidestep any copyright and contract laws. If they do, artists and writers may be pissed, but engineers are gonna be lit (as long as they hate current status quo of nothing being interoperable)
The typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec.
This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".
You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
Sounds like a good job for all that AI power that is being used for BS. I wonder if we could all crowd source a driver, 100s of claude and google gemini subscriptions working towards breaking the standard and releasing 100s of different implementations that does the same.
Yeah right, 100s of Claude and Gemini subscriptions towards breaking the standard... That's how things are done. Not just one guy with a good reverse engineering skillset.
What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now.
Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it.
For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes.
We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance.
It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.
I think you misread the comment. Each person's AI agent breaks the standard once. He was not claiming they would work together. And even if he the act of translating and understanding large sums of text (binary data) seems easier to divide and concor than open ended problems like cold fusion or unifying quantum physics and general relativity.
What would you expect from z'ers growing up under closed magical shells doing everything for themselves (smartphone and tablet OSes) and later being utterly lost with the basics of IT.
It's not the connector, it's the communication protocol.
It's super lame though. It will be great to watch the downfall of HDMI Forum when their artificial dam against DisplayPort in the living room finally breaks.
What is the dam against DisplayPort anyway? I never see it on TVs for whatever reason.
Actually it’s a bit odd, in my mind DisplayPort is highly associated with quality. But I don’t actually know if it is the superior connector or if it just seems that way because monitors are usually better than TVs in every metric other than size and brightness.
It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.
The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.
Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.
So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.
Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.
Here's a stupid question: per the site, "any entity wishing to make an active and material contribution to the development of future HDMI Specifications" can join the HDMI Forum for $15,000 p.a., and the Board of Directors is elected by majority vote by members.
Is there anything other than the money and desire to do so stopping 100 well-heeled Linux users from joining up and packing the board with open source-friendly directors who would as their first official act grant AMD permission to release its driver?
Did that change in a more recent version? According to the (admittedly old) source linked from the Wikipedia article, integrators are allowed to skip HDCP but incentivized with reduced royalties if they do support it.
> For each end-user Licensed Product, fifteen cents (US$0.15) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter reasonably uses the HDMI logo on the product and promotional materials, then the rate drops to five cents (US$0.05) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter implements HDCP content protection as set forth in the HDMI Specification, then the royalty rate is further reduced by one cent (US$0.01) per unit sold, for a lowest rate of four cents (US$0.04) per unit.
> It's not the connector, it's the communication protocol
In particular the link training procedures needed to reliably push 48 Gbit/s over copper are probably very non-trivial, and could be considered "secret sauce".
Well, if this were a free market, b/c there would be demand for it? I want a more standardized protocol so I need less cabling and connectors, and I want features like 4k that HDMI effectively (see TFA) does not support.
I would vote with my wallet … if I could.
Like, why do we need two connectors, for the same thing? DP is clearly technically superior.
Of course, there's a wide range of issues: there's a number of comments on this article stating how the HDMI forum is manipulating the market (e.g., by suppressing competitor connectors on the board, offering lower royalties for bugs, suppressing specifications), and then there's just getting out-competed by the litany of consumers who have no idea and do not care to know what they are buying, and marketplaces like Amazon that promote mystery-meat wares.
It's cheaper to implement than HDMI. So if DisplayPort ports are common on displays, devices will start using it (cheapo devices first). If DisplayPort ports are common on devices, displays won't need HDMI anymore. Plus, industry-wide, it's wildly inefficient to have one high-bandwidth video connector for monitors and a different one for TV's when the technical distinction between those is pretty much non-existent and we could scale our engineering effort across a much wider set of devices.
So, after a transition period, cost-saving will eventually lead to DisplayPort taking over.
Because the manufactures don't have to pay a license fee and so once someone start using it everyone will follow and then drop hdmi. However so far nobody has cared enough to be first.
GPMI isn't an open standard and it doesn't support HDCP. It might end up being very popular in China but it will be a hard sell in markets that aren't primarily consuming Chinese media.
Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
Why not? Its not an open standard. This is the rent-seeking behavior you get under for-profit capitalist implementations. This is why we push so hard for open standards.
That's meaningless, because they delegated licensing to HDMI® Licensing Administrator, Inc. And even if they are somehow a nonprofit: you are also not making any profit when all the money you retrieve via licensing fees is used to pay the royalties of the various patent holders.
Nobody cares if the mailing list where they discuss the upcoming specs is managed by a non-profit, the broader HDMI ecosystem is still a massive money grab.
Profit/non-profit isn't a big difference. Many non-profits are essentially businesses in practice (money spent/managed, the non-profit just a conduit to the for-profit companies that defacto own it), but just don't issue stock. A non-profit can act like this, and DOES. Non-profits exist in a capitalist context and inherit those norms. Again, this is why we aim for open standards.
Also a non-profit is just that, its not a charity. A charity is an entirely other classification and even those are regularly used and abused like this.
There is more than stock required to be non-profit. I suspect technically a non-profit could issue stock, though it is probably not something any would ever try.
Non-profit is a business arrangement where making money isn't the goal. There are many different versions of one though: many local clubs are a non-profit and they exist only for the benefit of their members.
it will be easy to prove that it is not technically possible since Git is decentralized. but fines... oh, those fines could be enormous. possibly, AMD could get barred from implementing HDMI at all - all HDMI has to do is to stop selling the spec to AMD specifically.
Depends on the country; US, probably not. Many european countries, probably yes. Asia? Your gov will ask you why you would bother them with a stupid and meaningless question like that in the first place.
Just because something is accessible publicly doesn't mean it's suddenly legal to copy it, same as it isn't OK to go into someone's house just because the door was open. Unless you're police for some weird reasons.
Legally dubious in what sense? Leaking it might break trade secret protection, but afaik once it's public, it loses that protection, and the only one liable is the leaker. As far as I know, software per se is still not patentable even in the US since the actual source code is abstract mathematics, so it should be fine to publish the source (source code is fundamentally a detailed description of an algorithm, not a system implementing it), and there's effectively no way to stop an end-user from compiling and loading that source themselves. You could also distribute it from a more reasonable country like e.g. VLC does.
I frequently see comments that say the TV companies are the ones getting the royalties, so I looked it up.
According to Gemini, the royalties go to the _original_ HDMI founders. That includes Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and Toshiba. It does not include Samsung, or LG.
There's no financial incentive. No other mass consumer device besides PCs use DisplayPort, heck, even PCs generally have an HDMI port. So the percentage of TV buyers who actually need to use DisplayPort (basically Linux users) would be a very very very small minority.
That would be easier if both GPU and display manufacturers weren't eschewing newer DisplayPort versions for older versions with DSC (which is not lossless despite its subjective claims of being "visually lossless"), while building in newer HDMI versions with greater performance.
To be fair, the DisplayPort 2.0/2.1 standardisation process was riddled with delays and they ended up landing years after HDMI 2.1 did. It stands to reason that hardware manufacturers picked up the earlier spec first.
what resolution is it that you can drive with "newer HDMI versions" but you cannot drive with DisplayPort 1.4 w/o DSC? The bandwidth difference is not really that much in practice, and "newer HDMI versions" also rely on DSC, or worse, chroma subsampling (objectively and subjectively worse).
I mean, one has been able to drive 5K, 4K@120Hz, etc. for almost over a decade with DP1.4, for the same res you need literally the latest version of HDMI (the "non" TDMS one). It's no wonder that display screens _have_ to use the latest version of HDMI, because otherwise they cannot be driven from a single HDMI port at all.
Having monitors that supported its native resolution through DP but not HDMI used to be a thing until very recently.
There are a lot of PC boards where the iGPU only has an HDMI 2.1 output, or with a DP1.4. But DP1.4 doesn't support some of the resolution/refresh combinations that HDMI 2.1 does. Normally this doesn't matter, but it could if you have, for example, the Samsung 57 inch dual 4K ultrawide.
The iGPU on my 9950X is perfectly capable of driving my Dell U4025QW 5k2k ultrawide. Yeah it would suck for any modern 3D games, but for productivity or light gaming it's fine.
It requires I use the DisplayPort out on Linux because I can't use HDMI 2.1. Because the motherboard has only 1 each of DisplayPort and HDMI this limits my second screen.
"Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.
the problem only affect a subset of HDMI 2.1 features, not HDMI 2.0
but the steam machine isn't really super powerful (fast enough for a lot of games, faster then what a lot of steam customers have, sure. But still no that fast.)
So most of the HDMI 2.1 features it can't use aren't that relevant. Like sure you don't get >60fps@4K but you already need a good amount of FSR to get to 60fps@4k.
Aren't DP-HDMI adapters good enough for the majority of consumers? On my ancient (2017) PC with integrated graphics I can't tell a difference between the DP out vs the HDMI out.
The article mentions that the Club3D adapters don't exist anymore (=the popular ones), only off-brand alternatives. VRR is not officially supported via adapters, a big problem for a gaming device.
I’ve been looking for a DisplayPort to HDMI cable to get around this on our household couch gaming computer. I have been unable to find one sketchy or otherwise that can handle high refresh rate and 4:4:4 color.
But are there any that don't overheat when you try to funnel dual screens through the USB-C/TB4?
The only setup I have that doesn't is a super minimal one that has a single DP out that feeds a daisy-chain (and a single USB out that feeds a simple hub for low bandwidth peripherals, and a PD in). Unfortunately, most of the screen pairs that I run don't do daisy-chain.
Every other hub I tried eventually got me to give up and connect one of the screens through direct HDMI.
I usually go for Cable Matters cables, they tend to be of a decent quality and follow the specs well. UGREEN is supposedly a reliable option too, though I cannot personally vouch as I haven't used their cables in particular.
This is fundamentally about DRM, isn't it? There is a working open source implementation already, but the HDMI cartel won't allow an open source implementation to have the encryption keys required to interface with the DRM in existing devices?
Source devices aren't required to output a DRM'ed signal though, are they? I think the DRM is only required on the receiver side. In that case a compliant source wouldn't need any keys, and besides, that wasn't a blocker for the previous HDMI versions which supported DRM too.
IIUC they're required to do a handshake involving encryption. Which is a form of DRM to enforce centralized control over the device ecosystem even if the subsequent video signals are not encrypted.
HDMI forum is a frontend for the cartel that profits from HDMI patents. Everyone should use USB 4 / DisplayPort instead and HDMI should go into the dustbin of history, but TV industry is slowing things down due this cartel.
Looks like Valve also needs to start making SteamTV, just a TV without any "smart" spyware/adware OS. Until then.. this blackfriday I ordered a TV that by miracle even has a DisplayPort input (Hisense 65U8Q). Unfortunately still "smart" TV but at least it does not have US-based OS but European made VIDAA which hopefully provides much less spyware than the US-alternatives, if it properly respects the EU GDPR laws. Hopefully Hisense starts/inspires a bigger movement towards DisplayPort and this HDMI mafia dies as soon as possible.
They could also potentially sidestep the issue by designing a discrete DisplayPort to HDMI chip into the system, so the HDMI 2.1+ implementation is firewalled from the open source stack. Maybe next time, if the HDMI Forum still hasn't budged by then.
Yeah, the chip they used isn't ideal though because it converts DP1.4 (32Gbit) to HDMI 2.1 (48Gbit), so the bandwidth is bottlenecked on the input side. Ideally you'd want a chip which takes DP2.1, which I'm not sure exists yet, and the upcoming Steam Machine only supports DP1.4 so it wouldn't have helped in that case anyway.
Imagine a Steam TV with the Steam Box simply built-in. That would be incredibly nice. The worst part of my brand new LG G5 OLED TV is the software itself. I'd pay a good deal more to have Valve responsible for the software running on my TV.
It might be nice for a little while, but the PC component is going to age much more poorly than the display will.
I think the better move would be for Valve to make a really nice gamer-oriented dumb TV that's essentially a 50"+ monitor. Kind of like those BFGDs (Big Format Gaming Displays) sans the exorbitant prices. The size of a Steam Box is in comparison quite diminutive, so finding a place to put it shouldn't be too much of an issue and the ability to swap it out for a newer model with the same screen 5+ years down the road would be nice.
And even better make it as open as Steam Deck/Machine and allow to install any GNU/Linux distribution onto it maybe even something with KDE Plasma Bigscreen or something similar if desired.
There's actually a quasi-standard of TV-compute unit interface made for industrial displays. This could be really nice for things like steam cards that could just slot into TVs with whatever performance you need.
My recent-model Samsung TV repeatedly opens a pop-up info window about their AI features while my AppleTV is playing movies and shows.
So I didn’t connect the TV OS and it’s still thrown in my face. It’s not the end of the world to have to find the tv remote and dismiss a popup every few days, but I sure would welcome competition who doesn’t try this sort of nonsense.
I've found you have to stay granular, i.e. to the model level rather than the brand level, or you end up with basically no consumer focused brand to pick from (or, even more likely, a misunderstanding that a given brand had no such problems because you didn't casually run across an example).
The TV manufacturers still make it highly annoying to avoid their integrated bullshit now. The setting to launch an LG WebOS TV into its last input on power-on is buried under 'advanced settings' several menus deep.
They would rather launch you into their home hub full of preinstalled apps even if it's not online...
... and the thing came with Microsoft Copilot installed, and you couldn't uninstall it, either.
This trick unfortunately falls down above a certain size, especially if you want to game at a good fps, and stay in the consumer space (price) rather than the commercial display space. That gigabyte 45 inch is too small to use above your fireplace and view across the living room.
In my case I compromised on needing 4k, and got an lg 65 inch with only HDMI.
I have been doing A/V systems professionally for many years and the best system I have found recently is a Sony TV with an Apple TV. No sign-in needed for the TV for basic setup, can be easily set to come on to a particular input, works well with the Apple remote, and functions well with no internet with just a little corner pop-up saying "no internet" when you first turn it on.
You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
> You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
Can you update via USB? I know my (couple years old now) Samsung TVs have firmware downloads available so you don't even need to connect the TV to anything.
Yes. I've owned a couple Android-based Sony TVs in the past decade and they both support updating firmware via USB thumb. They also support installing/removing packages with ADB, just like one would with an Android phone, in the case that there's some offline app you want to use on it. The newer models also do a neat thing where if you have external speakers hooked up, its internal speakers can be repurposed for center channel audio which is super cool.
I'll echo the Apple TV + Sony TV combo. It's very solid.
Apple + Sony sounds like a pretty nice combo, although unsurprisingly, right? It is a combination of premium brands. (Of course often premium brands are actually garbage in a nice shell, so maybe it is surprisingly not surprisingly bad, haha).
Projectors can be an option but the price point to get anything comparably good in terms of picture quality puts you squarely back in commercial TV pricing.
I don’t own a TV, but would’ve bought a LG just because of webOS if I finally decided to get one. But if it comes with uninstallable Microsoft apps, that changes it.
There isn't one that supports VRR/Gsync/Freesync well. What gamers want is chroma/RGB 4:4:4 + HDR + VRR/Freesync + 4k,120hz for their Linux PC on a TV. This is not possible with any DP --> HDMI 2.1 dongle on the market. They need support at the driver level to make this work. This is what the idiots at the HDMI forum are blocking. The only way to have high quality visuals on a PC/TV setup is to run Windows. That really sucks.
Not with good measured performance no. There are some which advertise good numbers (such as high refresh rates) but are unable to drive the panels to visibly change pixels at anywhere near the refresh rate.
Standard link to download: https://dokumen.pub/download/hdmi-specification-21-high-defi...
Alternative: https://annas-archive.org/md5/4dd395c749519a36cb755e6ebbe488...
Alternative (incomplete, only couple first page): https://device.report/m/91235972e8cbf6d6ce84f7cf84ca0ac12623...
Other HDMI stuff: https://pdfhost.io/v/YidEvBDkS_EP92A7E_EP91A7E_DS_V04
Older available here: https://glenwing.github.io/docs/
We really need to just force all standards organizations to release their standards for free. No making you pay $300 or whatever for a standard. (The PCI SIG makes you pay like $5000 for access to the PCIe standard...)
VESA makes you pay $5000 to get legal access to the DisplayPort standard. That is not the issue here.
It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.
Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.
Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee.
Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
Your claim is weird.
No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.
The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results.
If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents.
Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now.
The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own.
The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures.
In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
> No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.
unfortunately there are examples in the Telecom world
Most of the development costs are recouped through licenses on the base-stations and somewhat on the very low patent licenses per chip/device, not the price of access to the standard.
Back to the the HDMI standard, the licensing fee has already been paid by the hardware manufacturer. Restricting software is unnecessary, as the patent license fees have already been collected on the device.
It also becomes an issue when governmental/public standards start referencing these.
> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular.
I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?
Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I would think that making a standard freely available (and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues) would make the standard be adopted far more universally than putting up weird barriers to even access the standard.
I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular.
What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?
That sounds wonderful. A world without widespread high bandwidth wireless connectivity would be a better world.
It's about time somebody does some reverse engineering and just uploads the needed stuff online to make HDMI 2.1 work in Linux. It's getting absurd at this point. TV's need to start including Displayport, HDMI is a giant pain in the ass for gamers.
Not to mention, DisplayPort is the superior standard over HDMI in both technological terms as well as it being royalty free.
Yes and no. HDMI CEC works pretty decent these days, all the kinks have been worked out over the years and the only time it bugs out is if you use Chinese brands (looking at you, TCL) that write horrid firmware and never fix any bugs found after release.
Displayport has DDC/CI, which allows you to adjust things like brightness, volume, etc. remotely. This has existed since the DVI era (!) which means Displayport has a huge headstart. But they never formalized and enforced the DDC/CI spec, which means every monitor has extremely weird quirks. Some will allow you to send and read data. Some will only allow you to send data and crash when you try to read. Some will update only once every few seconds.
Although in this specific case, one wonders why Valve didn't just use two Displayport 1.4 ports and and stuck an onboard HDMI converter in front of one of them, sourced from a company that would be amenable to having Valve work on the firmware of said converter. Make the entire firmware of the converter open source except for the binary blob that handles the Displayport 1.4 -> HDMI 2.1 bits.
Hopefully Valve does this but sells it as a external, high quality converter. It would be a nice little plus even for non-Steam Machine owners, same way like Apple's USB-C to 3.5mm convertor is the highest quality mini DAC on the market for the low price of €10.
As long as you are okay with a 1-3m long cable.
Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPory is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.
nothing stops cable makers from making the same for DP
TFA says that AMD has a working 2.1 driver, but the hdmi forum goons rejected it.
Maybe one day I can pirate an HDMI driver
Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.
I'm switching to DisplayPort
Am I understanding correctly that the underlying issue is asking exorbitant prices to see the HDMI Forum’s specs? Feels like you shouldn’t be able to define an industry spec if you want to get paid for it, but maybe that would suppress smaller-scale, niche development.
No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.
Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).
1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
I suppose you could do a clean room reimplantation, but I doubt you could advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compliant without legal repercussions.
That's why you advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compatible instead. I believe there's precedence that allows that.
Yes, that might work. Strictly, HDMI is a registered trademark that might have strings but you could always say something like EIA/CEA-861... compatible instead
it's compliant with Valve Digital Media Interface. The fact signalling is same as for 2.1 HDMI is pure accident
trademark doesn't cover descriptive language. saying it is an HDMI port is trademarked. Saying it is compatible with HDMI cables and displays is a purely descriptive statement.
HDMI is patent-encumbered. The original specification has lost patent protection, but VRR and the other bits which form HDMI 2.1 and 2.2 are still protected as part of the Forum's patent pool. You could certainly try and upstream an infringing implementation into the kernel, but no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.
> no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.
In some jurisdictions, yes; however, some would probably still distribute it anyway, on purpose or not. I doubt all of them would get sued either, since lawsuits are expensive and difficult.
From my perspective, the objective is to make enforcement impractical.
I saw chinese hw companies use "HDTV" or "HD" to avoid HDMI trademark usage.
What would the legal repercussions be against an anonymous coder who donated the code to multiple code forges? Action against the code forges themselves? I mean, not like they would be able to find the guy.
On what basis? Trademark infringement?
Yes, that. I think you're only allowed to claim support/compliance if you're certified. And that, allegedly, means they run a couple of closed source tests and involves paperwork and NDAs.
It wouldn’t be HDMI 2.1 because it couldn’t be certified. And if you claimed it was 2.1 I imagine they would sue you.
Could it actually be made? I kind of wonder that. Like if one of the things you have to do is claim to the other device that you’re 2.1 would that get you in trouble? Or if you just advertise all the features and they each work is that good enough?
They could just say "we believe we're compliant with HDMI 2.1 but are not officially certified". No lies, no claims they can't make, and nothing I can see that would introduce legal risk to folks unless there's some patent encumbered garbage in the spec.
Right. I would just advertise the features not the version number.
My only concern there is the protocol stuff I mentioned.
generally if something is needed for interoperability the courts only accept patents as a way to protected it (patents have a limited lifespan). However the law gets really complex and you need a lawyer for legal advice.
I think in this case you still couldn't claim it was certified. It would be on users to discover that if they plug an HDMI capable screen into that HDMI shaped port on your widget device, things just work and video shows up as expected
Note that if the protocol itself only works if the device claims certification you may be able to claim certification in the protocol. However you couldn't claim certification in marketing or any other context except where things wouldn't work if you were not certified.
yeah I am curious too. Could I legally just reverse engineer that binary and re-implement it?
In general to avoid IP legal problems in the USA you can't do all of that yourself. Generally one party has to do all of the reverse engineering and write a specification based on that. Then another party can take that specification and write a "clean room" implementation.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
Are there examples where a single person doing it gets successfully sued? It could just be that those companies were extra risk adverse so they came up with monetarily inefficient ways to defend themselves.
I've been thinking about this recently. What if one of the parties is an LLM?
I think we’re waiting for the courts to deem LLMs able to sidestep any copyright and contract laws. If they do, artists and writers may be pissed, but engineers are gonna be lit (as long as they hate current status quo of nothing being interoperable)
Who knows, someone will have to get dragged into court to set that precedent one way or the other.
The typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec.
This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".
You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
Everything old is new again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
It worked out pretty okay for DVD Jon but I imagine it was a little scary for his dad and brother at the time.
Sounds like a good job for all that AI power that is being used for BS. I wonder if we could all crowd source a driver, 100s of claude and google gemini subscriptions working towards breaking the standard and releasing 100s of different implementations that does the same.
Yeah right, 100s of Claude and Gemini subscriptions towards breaking the standard... That's how things are done. Not just one guy with a good reverse engineering skillset.
What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now.
Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it.
For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes.
We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance.
It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.
I think you misread the comment. Each person's AI agent breaks the standard once. He was not claiming they would work together. And even if he the act of translating and understanding large sums of text (binary data) seems easier to divide and concor than open ended problems like cold fusion or unifying quantum physics and general relativity.
What would you expect from z'ers growing up under closed magical shells doing everything for themselves (smartphone and tablet OSes) and later being utterly lost with the basics of IT.
Great, now my face hurts from laughing.
And IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.
Why on earth is a connector standard secret?
It's not the connector, it's the communication protocol.
It's super lame though. It will be great to watch the downfall of HDMI Forum when their artificial dam against DisplayPort in the living room finally breaks.
What is the dam against DisplayPort anyway? I never see it on TVs for whatever reason.
Actually it’s a bit odd, in my mind DisplayPort is highly associated with quality. But I don’t actually know if it is the superior connector or if it just seems that way because monitors are usually better than TVs in every metric other than size and brightness.
Mass-market compatibility.
It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.
The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.
Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.
So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.
Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.
HDMI Forum don't like TV SOC boards that have both kinds of ports and discourage them from being made.
Also, HDMI Forum don't like converter boards that support every advanced feature at once (Variable Refresh Rate, HDR, etc.) and won't license them.
DisplayPort and HDMI kind of leapfrog each other in terms of technical superiority, so neither is definitively technically superior in the long term.
Apparently, the Hisense U8QG has DP-over-USB-C support. This might be the Trojan horse for DP in the living room.
Many TV manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum...
https://hdmiforum.org/members/
Here's a stupid question: per the site, "any entity wishing to make an active and material contribution to the development of future HDMI Specifications" can join the HDMI Forum for $15,000 p.a., and the Board of Directors is elected by majority vote by members.
Is there anything other than the money and desire to do so stopping 100 well-heeled Linux users from joining up and packing the board with open source-friendly directors who would as their first official act grant AMD permission to release its driver?
You’d want to submarine it because the forum could change its rules in “defense”.
But yes, it wouldn’t be much to do.
DRM, I believe
I don't think so, DisplayPort incorporates the same HDCP encryption standard that HDMI uses.
edit: the source that I found was incorrect, and this statement is false.
DRM is optional with DisplayPort but mandatory with HDMI.
Did that change in a more recent version? According to the (admittedly old) source linked from the Wikipedia article, integrators are allowed to skip HDCP but incentivized with reduced royalties if they do support it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081218170701/http://www.hdmi.o...
> For each end-user Licensed Product, fifteen cents (US$0.15) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter reasonably uses the HDMI logo on the product and promotional materials, then the rate drops to five cents (US$0.05) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter implements HDCP content protection as set forth in the HDMI Specification, then the royalty rate is further reduced by one cent (US$0.01) per unit sold, for a lowest rate of four cents (US$0.04) per unit.
You're right, the source that I found was incorrect.
> It's not the connector, it's the communication protocol
In particular the link training procedures needed to reliably push 48 Gbit/s over copper are probably very non-trivial, and could be considered "secret sauce".
That's done by the PHY layer, there's no need to implement that in software.
Why would display port ever start taking over in the living room?
Well, if this were a free market, b/c there would be demand for it? I want a more standardized protocol so I need less cabling and connectors, and I want features like 4k that HDMI effectively (see TFA) does not support.
I would vote with my wallet … if I could.
Like, why do we need two connectors, for the same thing? DP is clearly technically superior.
Of course, there's a wide range of issues: there's a number of comments on this article stating how the HDMI forum is manipulating the market (e.g., by suppressing competitor connectors on the board, offering lower royalties for bugs, suppressing specifications), and then there's just getting out-competed by the litany of consumers who have no idea and do not care to know what they are buying, and marketplaces like Amazon that promote mystery-meat wares.
It's cheaper to implement than HDMI. So if DisplayPort ports are common on displays, devices will start using it (cheapo devices first). If DisplayPort ports are common on devices, displays won't need HDMI anymore. Plus, industry-wide, it's wildly inefficient to have one high-bandwidth video connector for monitors and a different one for TV's when the technical distinction between those is pretty much non-existent and we could scale our engineering effort across a much wider set of devices.
So, after a transition period, cost-saving will eventually lead to DisplayPort taking over.
> when the technical distinction between those is pretty much non-existent
I think CEC support is still spotty and ARC (audio return channel) isn't supported at all in DP.
Well, CEC is a huge mess and barely works[1]. You're right on ARC and eARC. I'd rather DP had a better version of both, but that wouldn't happen.
[1]: If you have a stack that works, I'm happy for you, but trust you're just lucky to have a working combination.
Because the manufactures don't have to pay a license fee and so once someone start using it everyone will follow and then drop hdmi. However so far nobody has cared enough to be first.
USB C is at least one reason that will apply constant pressure.
tbh it'll probably be GPMI, not DisplayPort
GPMI isn't an open standard and it doesn't support HDCP. It might end up being very popular in China but it will be a hard sell in markets that aren't primarily consuming Chinese media.
How else will you charge people from implementing support for it?
Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
That's obviously less bad, but let's not pretend this is great either.
Yes, not great indeed. This is why we have av1, ogg, etc. with most of the hard research re-done just to sidestep those pesky patents.
We also have a secret json schema for Dolby Vision, idk why are you surprised. This talk is about protocol, but the connector.
Why not? Its not an open standard. This is the rent-seeking behavior you get under for-profit capitalist implementations. This is why we push so hard for open standards.
Uh, the HDMI forum is non-profit
That's meaningless, because they delegated licensing to HDMI® Licensing Administrator, Inc. And even if they are somehow a nonprofit: you are also not making any profit when all the money you retrieve via licensing fees is used to pay the royalties of the various patent holders.
Nobody cares if the mailing list where they discuss the upcoming specs is managed by a non-profit, the broader HDMI ecosystem is still a massive money grab.
Then why do they have all this?
Profit/non-profit isn't a big difference. Many non-profits are essentially businesses in practice (money spent/managed, the non-profit just a conduit to the for-profit companies that defacto own it), but just don't issue stock. A non-profit can act like this, and DOES. Non-profits exist in a capitalist context and inherit those norms. Again, this is why we aim for open standards.
Also a non-profit is just that, its not a charity. A charity is an entirely other classification and even those are regularly used and abused like this.
There is more than stock required to be non-profit. I suspect technically a non-profit could issue stock, though it is probably not something any would ever try.
Non-profit is a business arrangement where making money isn't the goal. There are many different versions of one though: many local clubs are a non-profit and they exist only for the benefit of their members.
And what if they just do it anyway? What are they going to do, sue them? Make them scrub every git repository on the planet?
it will be easy to prove that it is not technically possible since Git is decentralized. but fines... oh, those fines could be enormous. possibly, AMD could get barred from implementing HDMI at all - all HDMI has to do is to stop selling the spec to AMD specifically.
Would someone doing a clean room reverse engineering be permissible to then share would they built?
Depends on the country; US, probably not. Many european countries, probably yes. Asia? Your gov will ask you why you would bother them with a stupid and meaningless question like that in the first place.
Can't we just leak the spec?
Anyone can then implement opensource driver based on that and distribute it freely, since NDA won't apply to them.
Just because something is accessible publicly doesn't mean it's suddenly legal to copy it, same as it isn't OK to go into someone's house just because the door was open. Unless you're police for some weird reasons.
The problem isn’t that people don’t know how to do it.
So what, just the trademark issue for "hdmi 2.1"?
Call it a imdh driver then, nobody cares as long as it works.
No, for the resulting open drivers to not be legally dubious the spec can only be obtained by doing a clean-room reverse engineering.
Legally dubious in what sense? Leaking it might break trade secret protection, but afaik once it's public, it loses that protection, and the only one liable is the leaker. As far as I know, software per se is still not patentable even in the US since the actual source code is abstract mathematics, so it should be fine to publish the source (source code is fundamentally a detailed description of an algorithm, not a system implementing it), and there's effectively no way to stop an end-user from compiling and loading that source themselves. You could also distribute it from a more reasonable country like e.g. VLC does.
Just promote DisplayPort and boycott HDMI.
I frequently see comments that say the TV companies are the ones getting the royalties, so I looked it up.
According to Gemini, the royalties go to the _original_ HDMI founders. That includes Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and Toshiba. It does not include Samsung, or LG.
Is there a non-LLM source for that?
So why can't Samsung and LG do more do improve this mess and put USB 4 / DisplayPort in all their TVs?
There's no financial incentive. No other mass consumer device besides PCs use DisplayPort, heck, even PCs generally have an HDMI port. So the percentage of TV buyers who actually need to use DisplayPort (basically Linux users) would be a very very very small minority.
Because the number of people that care about this is so low that it doesn't affect their sales.
That would be easier if both GPU and display manufacturers weren't eschewing newer DisplayPort versions for older versions with DSC (which is not lossless despite its subjective claims of being "visually lossless"), while building in newer HDMI versions with greater performance.
To be fair, the DisplayPort 2.0/2.1 standardisation process was riddled with delays and they ended up landing years after HDMI 2.1 did. It stands to reason that hardware manufacturers picked up the earlier spec first.
what resolution is it that you can drive with "newer HDMI versions" but you cannot drive with DisplayPort 1.4 w/o DSC? The bandwidth difference is not really that much in practice, and "newer HDMI versions" also rely on DSC, or worse, chroma subsampling (objectively and subjectively worse).
I mean, one has been able to drive 5K, 4K@120Hz, etc. for almost over a decade with DP1.4, for the same res you need literally the latest version of HDMI (the "non" TDMS one). It's no wonder that display screens _have_ to use the latest version of HDMI, because otherwise they cannot be driven from a single HDMI port at all.
Having monitors that supported its native resolution through DP but not HDMI used to be a thing until very recently.
There are a lot of PC boards where the iGPU only has an HDMI 2.1 output, or with a DP1.4. But DP1.4 doesn't support some of the resolution/refresh combinations that HDMI 2.1 does. Normally this doesn't matter, but it could if you have, for example, the Samsung 57 inch dual 4K ultrawide.
I think you'd have bigger issues trying to drive that monitor with an iGPU
The iGPU on my 9950X is perfectly capable of driving my Dell U4025QW 5k2k ultrawide. Yeah it would suck for any modern 3D games, but for productivity or light gaming it's fine.
It requires I use the DisplayPort out on Linux because I can't use HDMI 2.1. Because the motherboard has only 1 each of DisplayPort and HDMI this limits my second screen.
I don't have one, but I suppose it would be just fine if you only use it for running a desktop environment.
"Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.
the problem only affect a subset of HDMI 2.1 features, not HDMI 2.0
but the steam machine isn't really super powerful (fast enough for a lot of games, faster then what a lot of steam customers have, sure. But still no that fast.)
So most of the HDMI 2.1 features it can't use aren't that relevant. Like sure you don't get >60fps@4K but you already need a good amount of FSR to get to 60fps@4k.
Not supporting VRR is a pretty significant issue.
Aren't DP-HDMI adapters good enough for the majority of consumers? On my ancient (2017) PC with integrated graphics I can't tell a difference between the DP out vs the HDMI out.
The article mentions that the Club3D adapters don't exist anymore (=the popular ones), only off-brand alternatives. VRR is not officially supported via adapters, a big problem for a gaming device.
err, that's what Valve is doing?
Well, only for the extremes where you'd need HDMI 2.1. 99% of HDMI displays will work without issue...
From the context I have, this complaint arose via development of the new (2025) Steam Machine.
Here’s their social media presence if anyone is feeling like they’d like to drop them a message:
https://www.facebook.com/HDMIForum/
https://twitter.com/HDMIForum/
https://www.instagram.com/hdmiforum/
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8553802
I assume I'm not the only one with a true WTF reaction to "HDMI has a facebook and an instagram?"
(I was quite a bit less surprised that there was no real content in them)
Need VDMI that is suspiciously similar and compatible with HDMI standard.
I’ve been looking for a DisplayPort to HDMI cable to get around this on our household couch gaming computer. I have been unable to find one sketchy or otherwise that can handle high refresh rate and 4:4:4 color.
https://www.club-3d.com/shop/cac-1088-1223 (https://geizhals.eu/club-3d-aktiver-adapter-cac-1088-a331004...)
https://www.club-3d.com/shop/cac-1087-1128 (3m cable version)
DP 1.4 → HDMI 2.1. Apparently they're no longer being manufactured (?? - not sure that's correct), so get one while it's still possible...
[Ed.: accidentally linked another adapter that is the other direction. Added 3m & direct manufacturer links.]
Ty for the links! I’ll look into this.
FWIW, most USB docks are effectively this. DP goes in via USB-C and HDMI comes out the other end.
I bought one from UGREEN on Amazon. I think it's called the 9 in 1. It does 4k@60 with HDR, coming out of SteamOS.
But are there any that don't overheat when you try to funnel dual screens through the USB-C/TB4?
The only setup I have that doesn't is a super minimal one that has a single DP out that feeds a daisy-chain (and a single USB out that feeds a simple hub for low bandwidth peripherals, and a PD in). Unfortunately, most of the screen pairs that I run don't do daisy-chain.
Every other hub I tried eventually got me to give up and connect one of the screens through direct HDMI.
But does it support VRR?
I’ve never thought about trying a dock. Thanks!
I usually go for Cable Matters cables, they tend to be of a decent quality and follow the specs well. UGREEN is supposedly a reliable option too, though I cannot personally vouch as I haven't used their cables in particular.
VMM7100 based devices like the Cable Matters 102101 work. Also allegedly CH7218 based adapters. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4773
According to the article, these adapters generally don't support VRR.
I think the article is honestly a little outdated on this point. The last couple of years the adapter market has caught up pretty well.
The UGREEN 8K@60Hz Display Port to HDMI Adapter I have sitting here supports g-sync (and claims support for freesync).
Why does everybody seem to overlook this?
more like HDM-Bye!
This is fundamentally about DRM, isn't it? There is a working open source implementation already, but the HDMI cartel won't allow an open source implementation to have the encryption keys required to interface with the DRM in existing devices?
Source devices aren't required to output a DRM'ed signal though, are they? I think the DRM is only required on the receiver side. In that case a compliant source wouldn't need any keys, and besides, that wasn't a blocker for the previous HDMI versions which supported DRM too.
IIUC they're required to do a handshake involving encryption. Which is a form of DRM to enforce centralized control over the device ecosystem even if the subsequent video signals are not encrypted.
I just use a DisplayPort to hdmi cable. Works well on my 4k@120 TV
HDMI forum is a frontend for the cartel that profits from HDMI patents. Everyone should use USB 4 / DisplayPort instead and HDMI should go into the dustbin of history, but TV industry is slowing things down due this cartel.
Dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153479>
Looks like Valve also needs to start making SteamTV, just a TV without any "smart" spyware/adware OS. Until then.. this blackfriday I ordered a TV that by miracle even has a DisplayPort input (Hisense 65U8Q). Unfortunately still "smart" TV but at least it does not have US-based OS but European made VIDAA which hopefully provides much less spyware than the US-alternatives, if it properly respects the EU GDPR laws. Hopefully Hisense starts/inspires a bigger movement towards DisplayPort and this HDMI mafia dies as soon as possible.
They could also potentially sidestep the issue by designing a discrete DisplayPort to HDMI chip into the system, so the HDMI 2.1+ implementation is firewalled from the open source stack. Maybe next time, if the HDMI Forum still hasn't budged by then.
Intel did this with the ARC A750/770
https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/HDMI-2-1-UHD-144Hz-A...
Yeah, the chip they used isn't ideal though because it converts DP1.4 (32Gbit) to HDMI 2.1 (48Gbit), so the bandwidth is bottlenecked on the input side. Ideally you'd want a chip which takes DP2.1, which I'm not sure exists yet, and the upcoming Steam Machine only supports DP1.4 so it wouldn't have helped in that case anyway.
Imagine a Steam TV with the Steam Box simply built-in. That would be incredibly nice. The worst part of my brand new LG G5 OLED TV is the software itself. I'd pay a good deal more to have Valve responsible for the software running on my TV.
It might be nice for a little while, but the PC component is going to age much more poorly than the display will.
I think the better move would be for Valve to make a really nice gamer-oriented dumb TV that's essentially a 50"+ monitor. Kind of like those BFGDs (Big Format Gaming Displays) sans the exorbitant prices. The size of a Steam Box is in comparison quite diminutive, so finding a place to put it shouldn't be too much of an issue and the ability to swap it out for a newer model with the same screen 5+ years down the road would be nice.
And even better make it as open as Steam Deck/Machine and allow to install any GNU/Linux distribution onto it maybe even something with KDE Plasma Bigscreen or something similar if desired.
You can get TVs with a "PC slot" like the Sharp M431-2. Just need a Steam Slot.
Is this an actual thing people can buy, or only companies?
There's actually a quasi-standard of TV-compute unit interface made for industrial displays. This could be really nice for things like steam cards that could just slot into TVs with whatever performance you need.
https://youtu.be/q9a3dCd1SQI
Does it really matter that much? Get a $20 roku or google tv stick or whatever you're comfortable with and don't connect the TV OS.
My recent-model Samsung TV repeatedly opens a pop-up info window about their AI features while my AppleTV is playing movies and shows.
So I didn’t connect the TV OS and it’s still thrown in my face. It’s not the end of the world to have to find the tv remote and dismiss a popup every few days, but I sure would welcome competition who doesn’t try this sort of nonsense.
Thank you. I was shopping for a TV to use as a display device for an Apple TV. I was considering a Samsung, but now I no longer am.
I've found you have to stay granular, i.e. to the model level rather than the brand level, or you end up with basically no consumer focused brand to pick from (or, even more likely, a misunderstanding that a given brand had no such problems because you didn't casually run across an example).
The TV manufacturers still make it highly annoying to avoid their integrated bullshit now. The setting to launch an LG WebOS TV into its last input on power-on is buried under 'advanced settings' several menus deep.
They would rather launch you into their home hub full of preinstalled apps even if it's not online...
... and the thing came with Microsoft Copilot installed, and you couldn't uninstall it, either.
The future!
The trick is to not buy a "TV".
Get a really big computer monitor/screen, and put it where you'd normally put your TV.
This trick unfortunately falls down above a certain size, especially if you want to game at a good fps, and stay in the consumer space (price) rather than the commercial display space. That gigabyte 45 inch is too small to use above your fireplace and view across the living room.
In my case I compromised on needing 4k, and got an lg 65 inch with only HDMI.
I have been doing A/V systems professionally for many years and the best system I have found recently is a Sony TV with an Apple TV. No sign-in needed for the TV for basic setup, can be easily set to come on to a particular input, works well with the Apple remote, and functions well with no internet with just a little corner pop-up saying "no internet" when you first turn it on.
You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
> You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it.
You also need to wipe the storage cache for the launcher app after disconnecting to get rid of the junky ads that get downloaded.
> You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
Can you update via USB? I know my (couple years old now) Samsung TVs have firmware downloads available so you don't even need to connect the TV to anything.
Yes. I've owned a couple Android-based Sony TVs in the past decade and they both support updating firmware via USB thumb. They also support installing/removing packages with ADB, just like one would with an Android phone, in the case that there's some offline app you want to use on it. The newer models also do a neat thing where if you have external speakers hooked up, its internal speakers can be repurposed for center channel audio which is super cool.
I'll echo the Apple TV + Sony TV combo. It's very solid.
Apple + Sony sounds like a pretty nice combo, although unsurprisingly, right? It is a combination of premium brands. (Of course often premium brands are actually garbage in a nice shell, so maybe it is surprisingly not surprisingly bad, haha).
Are projectors the alternative?
Projectors can be an option but the price point to get anything comparably good in terms of picture quality puts you squarely back in commercial TV pricing.
I don’t own a TV, but would’ve bought a LG just because of webOS if I finally decided to get one. But if it comes with uninstallable Microsoft apps, that changes it.
Out of curiosity, what was the attraction around webOS?
Yup LG was one of my contenders, but once I found out about this MS junk it was immediately off the list.
Yeah. I'm actually really mad at that one. They really ruined webOS.
https://old.reddit.com/r/webos/comments/1o886vc/ms_copilot_c...
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337033/lg-samsung-micros...
You can literally click to boot into "dumb mode" on all modern Google TVs such as Sony once and forget about it.
If Steam could find a good OEM to partner with, I would buy it in a heartbeat.
I don't know if any of the monitor manufacturers have an incentive to help Steam produce an ad-free, open-spec monitor/television.
Is the a USB-C/Thunderbolt to HDMI 2.1 dongle? Send Displayport and audio over USB-C and then let that hardware handle the HDMI handshaking.
There isn't one that supports VRR/Gsync/Freesync well. What gamers want is chroma/RGB 4:4:4 + HDR + VRR/Freesync + 4k,120hz for their Linux PC on a TV. This is not possible with any DP --> HDMI 2.1 dongle on the market. They need support at the driver level to make this work. This is what the idiots at the HDMI forum are blocking. The only way to have high quality visuals on a PC/TV setup is to run Windows. That really sucks.
This is terrible.
Aren't there on the market big "pc monitors" instead of tvs?
Not with good measured performance no. There are some which advertise good numbers (such as high refresh rates) but are unable to drive the panels to visibly change pixels at anywhere near the refresh rate.
Legally speaking, what is stopping someone from just reverse-engineering the specification and publishing it online somewhere?
Probably a lawyer with little legal standing that is however funded by a very large checkbook.
No one wants HDMI. No one.
Other than the TV, although its opinion carries a lot of weight in this discussion unfortunately.
I think that's more forced to by inertia, and the HDMI push for mandatory DRM