The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve’s Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations.
Console manufacturers all just need to switch to displayport to encourage tv manufacturers to do the same. No one’s going to not buy a ps6 or steam machine because they have to use a little dp-hdmi adapter, but they might be a little more likely to choose a tv that doesn’t need an adapter over one that does
Sony would probably create a proprietary standard before they’d switch to displayport.
Good point!
I agree with the sentiment but we’re dealing with a chicken and egg problem. If no TVs have DisplayPort, who would buy a console that can’t be used with their TV?
Not really. Both could start shipping both connectors, except if I’m unaware of some licensing issue over that?
If I’m a TV manufacturer, I have less incentive to have both connector types because it increases cost and complexity while only appealing to a very small subset of users. It will take leadership at those companies to take a bit of a leap of faith that the effort is valuable as a long term plan because it will take other manufacturers to make the ecosystem. Couple that with the fact that leadership at companies tend to not be enthusiasts or technically inclined and it makes it difficult, but not impossible. I really hope we can move electronics towards DisplayPort just so it’s an open standard instead of the HDMI for-profit model.
Ah, the Apple strategy of forcing a standard.
EDIT: By that I mean when Apple started putting USB (1.0) on their Macs back in the day to encourage more USB accessories. Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?) or lightning BS.
You’re thinking of firewire, and that was not proprietary. Sony came up with that. I had a mini disc player with a firewire port. And thunderbolt, which is what they use now, is an evolution on firewire made by Apple, Sony, and Intel.
Both firewire and thunderbolt are superior to USB.
Got a Firewire port on my PS2. The only thing I’ve ever owned with Firewire and I never even used it.
I have an old iMac that I use as a Plex server, and it has a firewire 800 port and a thunderbolt 1 port, both of which I use for a couple of very old external drive enclosures. Sure as hell beats USB 2.0.
I was thinking of the 30 Pin Dock Connector, which was proprietary, but it looks like it used both FireWire and USB protocols.
Apple was known for helping propagate FireWire too.
Leave it to me to only consider the male end of the connector 😜
The first time I ever used a firewire port, I thought it was black magic compared to usb. It was INSANELY faster and super consistent speed. It was the same level of wow as the first time I used an SSD vs HDD.
Compared to the top speed of USB 2.0, firewire 400 was actually faster in that regard (due to a consistent transfer rate rather than a variable one), and I’ll explain where the true performance came in to play, and how thunderbolt also has this amazing feature:
When usb connections begin to data transfer, they started at 0 Kb and slowly speed up to the maximum transfer rate. Then it slows down before completion. FireWire (and is successor, Thunderbolt) maintain a consistent data transfer speed. It begins at that transfer rate, and ends at that transfer rate. This is especially good if you’re moving around a large amount of small files.
Also, firewire 400 already beat out USB 2.0’s 382 Mb/s transfer rate. Firework 800 more than doubled it, and thunderbolt 1 started at 1.5 GB a second. We’re at thunderbolt 5 now, and I stopped keeping track of the data rates because they were so blazingly fast.
One drawback, however, is that firewire cables, and subsequently thunderbolt cables, are both extremely expensive and not very durable. They contain a lot more twisted copper wires, and tend to wear out faster. USB cables are nearly indestructible.
Additionally, firewire (and thunderbolt) are also a networking protocol. You can create an ad-hoc LAN just with firewire or thunderbolt cable cables. This is natively built into macOS, but, on Linux, it requires some sorcery to make it work. With a Mac, and an emergency, you can boot your Mac with a damaged hard to drive remote remotely from another functional Mac just by using a thunderbolt cable (or a firewire cable). It’s a neat trick, and has saved my ass more times than I can count.
One final awesome feature of thunderbolt 2+ is that a natively carries DisplayPort signals since switching to the USB 3 plug standard.
What about shipping an adaptor? DP to HDMI for the transition?
As long as the manufacturers are competing against each other, that’s never going to happen.
The “gamer” consumer demographic has some of the most whiny, entitled vocal minorities. They’re going to endlessly complain about the next generation of console needing a special cable/dongle to connect to their TV, one of the manufacturers are going to fold, and then the other one is going to walk back the lack of HDMI because they don’t want to lose sales to their competitor.
HDMI Forum has fewer than 80 members and membership fee is 15,000 USD/year. Valve could spin up 80 companies, have them join the forum for a low low price of 1.2M USD and outvote remaining members to open source the entire spec.
This is hilariously plausible. Someone SCUBA down to Gabe and give him the idea.
dives to 50 feet, removes tube from mouth to shout to Gabe, and fucking drowns
FWIW (and I know it’s not the joke…) it’s perfectly fine to remove the mouth piece while scuba diving. In fact it’s part of basic training. You should be able to remove the mouth piece and take another one, your octopus or the one of your buddy, in case there is an incident.
No… the real question for a good diver is how the heck you’re going to say HDMI 2.1 with hand signs! /s
You breathe through an octopus? Don’t they need that oxygen themselves?
Just have to ask nicely. 🐙
(for people confused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Octopus )
You really going to be the “akshullay” person about hyperbole?
tips fedora
rofl, I hate billionaires but this would be peak trolling
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What does this even mean in this context
I’m pretty sure the saying goes, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Which implies that you shouldn’t be blaming the bad actors but the bad system that causes it to be that way.
Does it have to be companies? Could individual people just have 15k, and join? We just need 81 new members.
Unfortunately it not only has to be companies, but unless you are a producer of products that are HDMI certified already your membership will be denied. It would take a lot of fuckery to make that many corporations and not have all of their membership applications be denied. Also I’m not sure that it’s even a voting democracy in the traditional sense even if you could.
While doing that for 80 companies is not feasible I doubt all 80 members are opposed. Valve and AMD could talk to video card, monitor, laptop and handheld makers to pad the membership enough.
As for the democracy question a quick skim of their bylaws suggests it’s close enough.
Don’t you just need to setup a run of HDMI devices and have 80 companies invest together as a group for manufacturing, then have each company put their own sticker on it.
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Are people just forgetting it has a displayport also? Just ignore HDMI, they got greedy, onto the rubbish pile they go.
The people who block HDMI for Linux are also the people who make TVs and other media stuff. So you may not be able to use displayport or hdmi just because some rich people decided so to make more profit.
The problem is that many TVs have HDMI, but no DP.
Then buy a DP to HDMI 2.1 dongle
No problem for me, but many consumers don’t think that far.
Does it have VGA?
Ok but I need a pretty expensive active adaptor for my tv?
It’s $1.2M to gain majority share on the HDMI board, but it sure would be nice if someone gave $1.2M to one of the engineers with access to that cryptographic DRM keys for the binary to “apparently get hacked” and have the keys magically appear online.
I recently watched a video about HDMI. I didn’t hate HDMI but now I kinda do.
Unfortunately most standards bodies are pretty much this stupid though. Blu-ray, DVD, USB, hell even codecs like H265 and MP3 have governing bodies that are mostly enterprises enforcing their collective power on standards. That’s good in ways because it means they all have to decide on a standard that’ll work wihh to pretty much anything, but bad because they can also enforce bullying like HDCP onto consumers.
That sucks
HDMI, what’s that ?
sent from my DisplayPort monitor
You wrote that didn’t you
I wish I could buy hardware without HMDI at all so they got no money from me.
As much as I agree I think it would have been a bad move for them to do that. The devices success is already highly dependant on its price, which is still in flux as far as I understand, there is no reason for them to make the decision even more difficult.
Not all software available on Linux is open source. NVIDIA drivers for example. Hell, most of the games on Steam are closed source.
So, is it just a matter of principle on Valve and AMD’s part that they only want to ship with fully open source drivers?
I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to understand why you can’t just make the HDMI 2.1 part of the driver code closed source and the rest of the graphics drivers open?
Modern specs are complicated. I vaguely remember something about a cryptographic key the driver needs to be signed with to successfully complete the handshake to enable all display options between the computer and display.
Not entirely unwarranted either, an unexpected amount of voltage on an unexpected pin because the driver / hardware is misconfigured damaging your TV would suck. (Still sounds like the Forum is being a dick about it though.)
Are your electric plugs closed source lmaoi
Evil, greedy little bastards…
Can the HDMI standard not be implemented in hardware somehow, and then the open source software just talks to that hardware?
It seems ridiculous that you can make a device that works fine under HDMI 2.1 but you can’t access it with open source code.
It’s got DP as well though so it’s not all that bad. We really should be pushing manufacturers over to DP anyway.
It’s literally the same feature set.
While infuriating, I think people who care about features limited to hdmi 2.1 are people having monitors with display port and people who use the box as console on “normal tv” are happy with 4k60
But I hate, that there is no wide supported open video protocol…
OVFP is needed (Open-Video-Format-Protocol).
Best as interoperable over hdmi, display port and USB-C cables.The HDMI forum can go fuck itself
How illegal would it be to provide an AI model with a button “modify the GPU driver until HDMI 2.1 features are working properly”?
Last I checked it requires a closed source binary upload that contains cryptographic keys
I mean if the binary and the keys are available somewhere on the internet…
