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Fuck hdmi
https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
It's pretty weird that this organization that exists only to extract rents from people who want to use hdmi remains unwilling to do so even for a customer as large as Valve. I wonder who has given them the motivation for it, and how much it cost them.
Their motivation is staying away from open platforms, and protecting their members' IP rights. Gotta thwart those pirates.
AMD is nearly 100x the size of Valve, and they couldn't get HDMI 2.1 approval on Linux. Nvidia somewhat has it with their proprietary drivers, but not nouveau.
They're not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.
The movie studios. As the person above said, the HDMI consortium (owned by movie studios) is focused on protecting their members IP rights from pirates. HDMI has built in DRM, that could be removed from an open source driver.
Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don't appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.
The HDMI founders were Hitachi, Matsushita (now Panasonic), Maxell, Philips, Silicon Image (now Lattice Semiconductor), Sony, Thomson (now Vantiva), and Toshiba.[3] Intel contributed the HDCP copy protection system.[4] The new format won the support of motion picture studios Fox, Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney, along with content distributors DirecTV, EchoStar (Dish Network) and CableLabs.[2]
While Sony is a technology company, they're also a very sue happy IP holder through Sony pictures and Playstation.
Sony continues to be a major player on the HDMI forum.
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I haveb't looked into this particular group, but usually it's patents. Someone owns a patent for the tech required to implement the standard, and they "license" it out to anyone who wants to implement that standard. Obviously, they won't agree to terms that hurt their ability to collect rent on their patent. Qualcomm is famously guilty of this in the modem space.
Does that seem stupid, to adopt an industry standard that requires patented technology to implement? That's because it is, and were we a sane society we would invalidate any patents that become an industry standard, but we're a bunch of idiots with a billionaire cuck fetish.
It's wild how much we flock around such shitty standards all the time, generation after generation.
We don't flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.
One of the biggest problems is that shitty standards use the money they get from licensing the standard to push the standard. Good open standards often don't have a marketing budget to play with. On top of that, shitty standards can make unrealistic promises to gain an advantage. Like HDMI does with DRM. "If every device uses this standard, piracy will be a thing of the past!"
Yes, that is what I meant, the 'we' used like an alien might observe us.
Theoretically we could stop buying TVs, but practically we are forced into it by supply.
And yes, licencing a standard beyond dev should be just illegal, it hurts (almost) everyone.
We don't flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.
Nothing is forced on anyone. If people refused to buy them they would be forced to add other ports.
However as someone who considers themselves fairly techy and doesn't comply with such shitfuckery, I only learned about this last week.
Moving forward I just won't be buying any TVs at all.
Edit: God fucking forbid any of you actually do anything, or even better, refrain from doing anything, besides bitch and moan on the internet.
This ethical position is such crap in the modern era and if you take it you simply aren’t going to be contributing to this conversation much longer. Unless you go full stallman and get a specific laptop from 15 years ago with very specific hardware that you can flash and install very specific software onto it you have to make peace with the fact that as a modern consumer the landscape has fucked you.
Your choices are to moderate how fucked yoh get in terms of anticonsumer bullshit because the market is stacked against you and the illusion of choice is always there. HDMI is a great example, smartphone platforms outside of android and ios is another. Are their options outside of these walled gardens? Technically but they’re generally much worse and often cost more than a comparable model.
It’s just you can refuse to buy an iphone, you can refuse to buy an android, but you can’t really refuse to buy a smartphone in the modern era. You can refuse to buy a tv but you can’t really refuse to buy a display of some kind. You might think you beat the system if you just get a laptop or computer monitor I guess but not really, monitors increasingly don’t have DP and frankly the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway. Consumers are idiots who will continually vote to fuck themselves. We need regulatory oversight.
the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway
Voting with your wallet is literally the only way things will ever improve.
See how well that has worked over the past 40 years? I mean don’t buy shit you don’t support obviously but don’t expect a personal boycott or even advocating heavily for others to the same to have any kind of impact whatsoever.
It’s because the average consumer is dumb but this isn’t an indictment of the average consumer, necessarily. The average consumer doesn’t want to have to do research on every fucking thing they buy to find out the nefarious bullshit about it. Oh the tv doesn’t support open connection standards, oh my phone is a walled garden built for data collection, oh this smart lightbulb is a privacy nightmare with bullshit tos and also has security issues, etc. They just want to go on amazon or to home depot or whatever and buy shit that looks like it will do what they need for a price point they can afford.
That’s where regulatory oversight comes in: given the above and a consistent lack of consumer ability to enforce standards we need political oversight to pick up the slack. This is a unified arm where a consumer frustration can turn into action much more quickly, even if sales continue because of market fuckery (eg tvs still selling because you can only buy hdmi TVs). But unfortunately we live in a country where the tech industry has performed a near and total regulatory capture and has no fear that regulatory oversight will ever occur, and they’re probably right, at least for now.
So you’re wrong that it’s the only way, and I would argue it’s the most ineffective and inefficient way. It just feels like it’s the only way because of our failed state political situation where even a regulatory concern that should be a slam dunk like right to repair often either fails or only passes in a greatly neutered state because the local politicians thought Microsoft and Apple made some great points about preventing local jobs so that tech billionaires could continue to make even more money
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Quit posting ancap propaganda.
The way this sort of thing would actually improve is by government regulation.
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This explains so much why actual voting numbers are so poor in the US...
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That’s great for you, but try to convince one other person who’s not already in your headspace they should not buy any more TVs. That’s almost an impossible ask. Like telling someone not to get an Android or iPhone because of the data collection. Geeks like us can put up with these inconveniences but we’re a very small minority.
People are still going to get the product unless there’s a truly viable alternative available. Until we see a new standard whose goal is to specifically target replacing HDMI in this context, there’s not really any way to suggest people “vote with their wallet” on something as common as HDMI.
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As end consumers we individually have no power to affect the types of products that are offered. What am I supposed to do? Find me a TV that supports DisplayPort
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Now if you could just convince the rest of the country to not have a TV in every room of their houses.
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Displayport needs to start showing up on TVs and eventually get standards for stuff like eARC and HDMI CEC
TV OEMs are apparently part of the HDMI forum and therefore complicit.
We need EU regulation if we want to have this.
I remember when HDMI came out and then DP.
I wish I knew what was actually going on at the time with regards to licensing, I just knew they both worked and didn't really pay much attention to things. Sometimes I'd use DP sometimes HDMI.
If I'd known, I definitely would have made a more concerted effort to support DP when it could have made a bigger difference.
DisplayPort for the win
Sincerely! As someone who dislikes DisplayPort, moves like that makes me want to use it over HDMI.
Hmm, that's a new one for me. Why the dislike for DisplayPort?
I had many problems with it in the past. It has been behaving well with me in the last 1-2 years though
"We need to develop a one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases."
At least one person got the joke. 😁
It exists. It’s Display Port.
The use case of "make a shit ton of money licensing a proprietary standard" is kind of mutually exclusive with other use cases. It would be hard to cover.
At the time, there were too many standards. But looking back from today, we see that standardization does eventually occur, it just takes time.
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It already comes with DP 1.4. enough for me
Well Valve should sell an optional DisplayPort adapter then, right?
The Steam Machine is supposed to be plug and play, and not getting VRR on your TV is a huge compromise.
Most people who want plug and play probably don't know what VRR is.
Heck I don't fully remember it and I actually learned why it's nice and would want it.
It should automatically be enabled if it’s supported, and just give you a straight up better experience. At lower frame rates and budget hardware, the difference is especially dramatic.
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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