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.
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.
The HDMI forum can go fuck itself
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.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?
TVs are starting to come with DisplayPort already in the form of USB-C alt mode.
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.
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.
I mean we don’t use coax/channel 3 any longer. Just do it.
Well how do YOU connect your NES up to your TV then???
I have actually been looking at modding an NES with HDMI (and other goodies) as a small project. There are various kits out there.
That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”
Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.
Because of that lack of perceptible benefit to them, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t going to be good. Even if it’s an objectively better standard from a technical perspective, it will just come across to consumers as an unnecessary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.
They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.
The only way console manufacturers are going to stay united in kicking HDMI to the curb is if the organization behind HDMI pulls a Unity move and starts charging royalties to the manufacturers for every time a consumer plugs the console into a TV.
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 )
rofl, I hate billionaires but this would be peak trolling
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I fucking hate this phrase. You have the choice to not participate and be a normal human instead of a sociopath.
Hate the players because they perpetuate the game.
It’s even more pathetic than that. They aren’t just expressing their will to play the game, they are asking for approval despite it. It’s similar to the “nothing personal” disclaimer which is usually followed by something with significant personal disruption.
Most honestly expressed, they’d be, “I’m doing/about to do something that impacts you negatively, please don’t retaliate against me because I don’t like it when negative things happen to me.”
Edit: just noticed the commenter you replied to reversed the original saying and agrees with you.
No players, no game
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.
Which is asinine both here and in its original use. If there weren’t bad actors the system wouldn’t be broken. The players make the game.
I can easily hate both of them
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.
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.
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.
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https://hdmiforum.org/members/
AMD is part of the forum but can’t get them to accept their own open source driver. I guess we can’t complain or shame all of them in one. I wonder who voted reject vs accept.
Sad.
Then AMD needs to apply more leverage or start an awareness campaign with as much shit PR for every business supporting them.
Fewer than 80 members. 15k/year membership fee and very lax joining requirements. $1.2M gets you majority allowing you do to whatever even with 100% of current members opposing :P
How hilarious would it be if the AMD board member was the one who veto’d the driver 😅
AMD has had the code ready to include in their open source driver for a while and has been trying to get HDMI Forum to let them release it for a long time https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Wild to see DisplayLink among the companies here.
I was confused by seeing DisplayLink there, but couldn’t fully place them, and Wikipedia made me think they may be using HDMI and have an interest in keeping it inaccessible to sell their products and services.
Knowbe your enemy, they say.But jokes aside, I believe DisplayLink’s focus is primarily on the client<->docking station part, with docking station<->monitor usually still being HDMI/DP (same with direct client<->monitor links). So they still have to interface with it some way or another.
We need more DisplayPort in the world - and better support for multi-monitor setups under Linux.
What are you missing in multi-monitor setups under Linux?
Every time I plug a second monitor into my Linux PC (Mint), both screens start blinking on and off. Sometimes Win+P works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve asked in the Discord, I’ve tried arandr. Nothing works.
Multimontitor display issues are why I switched from mint to a distro that uses Wayland
Do you have adaptive sync on? If you do try turning it off for both monitors. That worked for me but your milage may vary.
Mint isn’t wayland yet and X11 does not support adaptive sync if multiple monitors are connected
I don’t even know what that is, frankly.
It’s a generic term for Freesync/GSync, having a variable refresh rate.
Oh. No, my monitors should always be at 60Hz now. They’re both DC powered (internal + USB).
Odd, I have three screens active on my Mint desktop right now. I’ll have to try this on my Mint laptop and see what happens.
What kind of GPU are you using?
Neofetch says that it’s seeing an AMD ATI Radeon HD 8730M and an Intel Haswell-ULT, which is probably the chipset connected to the i7-4600U, and I’m assuming what 99% of the graphics are being generated on.
Try making the move to Wayland. I habe zero issues cinnecting or disconnecting monitors.
If I can do it while keeping Cinnamon, and my current desktop, I might.
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
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.
Wouldn’t make it legal to use them anyway and a big company like steam couldn’t get away with it.
It would still be great for the open source community working on personal projects and such
I bet we would start to see chinese adapters showing up on the market with DisplayPort to HDMI2.1 though.
Oh yeah, and and they would mostly be terrible, except one brand no one has ever heard of but, it’s apparently a big name in China, and called something like Zloks would inexplicably be the king of that particular niche product.
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You can/should write your congressman (or equivalent in your country). Just the threat that if OSS can’t use HDMI congress will open up the laws will get action. In a democracy voters have more power than big money when they care and vote like it.
That’s cute.
Hahaahahhaaa omg, you’re adorable.
Could work in the EU.
But why does the HDMI fourm not want a open source 2.1-compliant implementation? Is it DRM related? I feel like it’s DRM related.
Its fully DRM related.
My guess is if it’s open source it’s more easily cracked.
Likely moreso that they’re facing pressure from other competitors in the industry that see Steam and open source in general as a threat to their business model. The HDMI forum is made up of industry leaders, and naturally Microsoft and Sony are there.
They’ve been refusing open HDMI 2.1 since 2017. I don’t think that being afraid of Linux becoming the dominant gaming platform plays a role here; it’s more likely that they’re afraid people might find new ways to get at protected content.
Ive never had using HDMI prevent me from enjoying pirated media, so Ive always been confused about what sort of drm a TV is looking for.
It’s more of a barrier for people who are pirating media, not the ones consuming that pirated media.
Don’t they mostly download it directly from streaming platforms these days, skipping the display and its connector altogether…?
Isn’t getting at protected content pretty trivial anyway? At least that’s my impression from how easy it is to find basically anything.
But why does the HDMI forum not want a open source 2.1-compliant implementation?
To my knowledge they’ve never officially said but you can be sure that it has to do with Content Protection and that means DRM. An Open Source HDMI 2.1+ driver would make pirating much simpler, probably trivial and they don’t want that.
It’s possible anyway of course but there are a couple of hardware hoops to jump through and that’s enough to keep most people from doing it.
Because that would open source certain implementations they want to hold captive.
It also enforces closed source drivers which can be shipped with spyware/crapware, further extending profits for companies… companies that happen to make up the HDMI Forum.
They charge a fee for access to the spec and maintain who can claim their products are HDMI compliant and require compliance testing on those products.
An open source implementation would make that spec public and strip a lot of control they hold.
Part of being open source is subsequent licensing. This would allow any others to piggyback and avoid the fee.
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.)
unless you’re a NES. which then a voltage spike gets the DRM permanantly out of the way forever.
Recent Nvidia drivers are open source
Maybe a dumb question… if I used a DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 adapter, would I get 4K at 120Hz on the Steam Machine and my LG CX tv?
Depends on the adapter and source. You may find issues when playing HDPC protected content if you buy a low quality adapter.
DisplayPort to HDMI doesn’t need an adapter since DP has an alt signal mode with HDMI support.
Although I’m not sure 2.1 signalling is available yet or not.
DP++ HDMI support tells the GPU to output HDMI. If the GPU can’t output HDMI 2.1 over an HDMI port, it can’t output it over a DisplayPort (as a general rule; you could theoretically wire the DP for a higher standard, but why would you?)
Yeah, just it doesn’t support VRR. If you read the article, you’d know
If the article didn’t require accepting cookies to read it I would :D (just being snarky)
Nah, I don’t blame you. The list of crap that I had to allow under “required” to read the article was preposterous.
Evil, greedy little bastards…
They are clearly in the pockets of Microsoft.
