Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
heise.de828 points by OsrsNeedsf2P a day ago
828 points by OsrsNeedsf2P a day ago
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/
AIUI the spec being leaked ironically makes things worse, because for an unofficial implementation to be legally kosher it would have to be clean-room reverse engineered anyway, and since the official spec is out there the integrity of such an effort would be called into doubt. You'd somehow have to prove you didn't look at it, ever, or at least be trusted enough for people to take your word for it.
(I'm not a lawyer, please correct me if I'm wrong)
Reading a standards spec to understand what the device you paid for does?
Straight to jail!
Pirating the entire internet to train your AI?
That's fair use.
That's why we have to train LLMs to infringe patents and implement them. That's fair use by their own logic.
They're wrong, there's nothing stopping you implementing anything you like, you just can't use the HDMI brand without complying with their rules.
This sounds too easy to be true.
Does the "brand" include the physical shape of the connector?
Could I make hardware with a "NotHDMI" port that "happens" to be mechanically compatible with HDMI plugs, has the exact same pinout, etc etc?
Even then: In the OP case the hardware is already there, it's only about the driver. So wouldn't a driver for hardware that very clearly identifies the port as "HDMI" run into the same problem, even if the driver itself never mentions the term?
No, the connectors wouldn't be regulated, you're not violating any IP by buying them and there's no prohibition on any of the manufacturers selling them to unlicensed companies. At worst you can assert a patent against the design but there's no specific patent for that design, there are patents for some aspects of the design/implementation but they're hold by the manufacturers of the connectors themselves.
There have been many examples in the past of consumer electronics companies selling things that are electrically and logically compatible with HDMI, but they just have to avoid using the word HDMI.
Probably one thing that the HDMI forum is holding over AMD/Valve is that there's an API to manage some of the functions of the HDMI driver. They could infer that this API is a part of the closed standards of HDMI Forum. But 90% of the threat is about certification and branding I am sure.
You reminded me of the flipper zero video game module[0] with it's "video out port" which "transmits a video signal in DVI-D format to an external TV, monitor, or projector".
They are not quite the size of Valve though, and can expect people to figure out what that that port is.
They just used the well-known PicoDVI implementation that exists for the Raspberry Pi Pico:
> https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico-video-o... (scroll down to "DVI")
Can we just train an AI with the spec and then vibe code an implementation?
I hope someone can do this in such a manner as to engineer the collision of the legal titans. Either way, we win on some ground.
IP vs AI, round two, Fight!!!
> IP vs AI, round two, Fight!!!
I want to hear an EPIC RAP BATTLE OF HISTORY version of this.
Just get said AI to write it yourself for my own hardware.. come get me HDMI law nerds!
I have thought about writing a python web framework were instead of writing a function that handles a request, you write a docstring and the an AI JIT generates your handling code. Could we not just prompt-engineer a solution for the missing bits in the driver for the HDMI2 stuff and have it be lazily generated via a model parameter and an API key? And then, in about 10 years, we could just do it locally once the models become runnable on commodity hardware. What a future too look forward to.
This is not a web framework, but it's pretty close to what you've imagined: https://github.com/JirkaKlimes/jit-implementation
Changes are the leaked spec might already be in the popular LLMs' training data, so you could probably skip to step 2 without having to do the (potentially problematic) training yourself.
Are you ridiculing the concept of imaginary property?
It does make sense. If you are on the money receiving side.
On the other side: do you pay license fees to your parents, your teachers, ... everybody you ever learnt from? No? Why not? Didn't everybody learn by copying first?
What about imitation? What does freedom of art and science even mean? You call it parody. I call it theft.
See. You need the contradionary concept of imaginary property. Otherwise, how do we get rich quick? Live performance, consultation, teaching? Nah, those are for loosers... Rent seeking it is.
/s
Innocence until proven guilty should mean the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove you actually looked at it right? Although that isn't necessarily how it works in the real world. IANAL.
But I also don't understand how they would enforce that you can't use a leaked spec. If there are patents involved that would hinder an open source implementation regardless of if it was clean room or not. I don't think copyright would apply, because the implementation is not the same as the spec. And trademark would only apply if you used hdmi branding materials (so just say something like "this driver provides compatibility with an interface that has been hostile to open source that starts with h and ends with i"), and if you use a leaked spec, you didn't sign any contracts saying you can't implement it.
> Innocence until proven guilty should mean the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove you actually looked at it right?
It wouldn't be criminal, just civil, and civil trials have much lower standard for the burden of proof. It's just preponderance of evidence (more likely than not), instead of beyond all reasonable doubt.
The level of proof required is lower, but AFAIU, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, not the defendent.
The game is getting sued by the HDMI forum. It doesn't matter how "clean" your implementation was. They're just going to sue you _anyways_.
IIUC, the problem is a bit tautological. Regardless of legality of reverse engineering itself, HDMI is a trademark which you obviously cannot use without being licensed. Using HDMI connector itself is probably a grey-ish area: while you can buy the connectors without agreeing to any licenses and forwarding compliance on vendor, it would still be hard to argue that you had no idea it was a HDMI connector. If you are using the HDMI connector, but are not sending anything else but DVI over it, it should be fine-ish.
The real problem starts when you want to actually support HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 on top. Arguing that you have licenced for 2.0 and then tacked a clean-room implementation of 2.1 on top gets essentially impossible.
For stuff like connectors, this gets worked around by using terminology like “compatible with HDMI” all the time. You are explicitly permitted to reference your competitor’s products, including potential compatibility, by trademark law. I suspect the risk here is mostly contractural - AMD likely signed agreements with the HDMI forum a long time ago that restrict their disclosure of details from the specification.
HDMI's gate is certification and the ability to then use their marketing brand.
This is absolutely not a technical issue. You can implement the 2.1 spec if you want, you just can't say it's 2.1.
If Valve wanted they could happily get it to work and let people figure out that it works, they just can't use that title in their marketing.
IIUC the issue is not them being unable to implement 2.1 at all, but rather provide specifically open source implementation. They probably could provide a binary blob.
That's probably how NVidia did it.
But there's very little software involved in HDMI, it's mostly hardware and a control API.
The connector itself shouldn't be an issue, because it doesn't fall under IP. The shape of the connector is entirely functional, so there's no creative work involved, so it would fall under patent law. However, the connector itself is unlikely to be innovative enough to be patentable, so it's not protected by patent law either.
Using HDMI connectors is totally fine. You just can't label it as "has HDMI port", as "HDMI" is a trademark.
Is that true? There is obviously some creative work in connector design - optimizing for looks, robustness to damage, dirt, easy of use, reliability technically, etc.
I've seen HDMI devices for sale on AliExpress that list their port as "HDMI-compatible" or just "HD" to avoid that certification requirement.
AFAIK clean-room reverse engineering is sufficient but not always necessary for such an implementation to be allowed, but it does make the fair use argument a bit more difficult. (and of course the DMCA criminalizes any reverse engineering of 'technical safeguards' regardless of how you do it)
They don't really have to worry about patent infringement, the biggest issue is that they can implement anything they want, they just can't call it HDMI 2.1 without certification.
That's confusing for the consumer but technically viable.
HDMI exists to write standards, to certify them and to enforce the brand integrity. Patents are a different issue and would be handled separately.
(I am an engineer who spent half his career dealing with this stuff at a technical, legal and commercial level).
> they just can't call it HDMI 2.1 without certification
The problem is more that they can't use the HDMI trademark at all, not just for the HDMI 2.1 on Linux implementation. That makes it a non-starter for AMD or Valve, but in theory should not stop an individual who doesn't care about marketing anything as being HDMI-compatible.
Clean room RE isn't legally required. It just makes a stronger defense against claims of infringement.
Clean room reverse engineering produces specification when you don't have it. When you have specification, you don't have to reverse engineer it.
Probably now or the very near future you could have an LLM that's provably trained on dataset where the leaked spec isn't included in the dataset and have it perform the reverse engineering work.
As someone who’s excited to see this happen eventually, it’s not happening anytime soon. Combinatorial optimization techniques are far better suited for this and methods created 50 years ago run laps around LLMs
>You'd somehow have to prove you didn't look at it, ever, or at least be trusted enough for people to take your word for it.
How could one prove a negative? It's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, isn't it? They'd have to prove that you've looked at the spec files.
> innocent until proven guilty
In the US at least, for criminal cases, the burden of proof for guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt". For civil cases they are much more lenient and use the "reasonable person" standard.
> You'd somehow have to prove you didn't look at it
You can't prove something that didn't happen, unless you were monitored your whole life or at least from the moment the item came into being. It's an unreasonable level of proof.
Summarizing this thread:
- I paid for a device with a properly licensed hdmi port. It runs linux. So patent exhaustion applies, at least in the US. I can say ignore the patents to make my property work.
- I have no relationship to the HDMI people. (Never entered into a contract with them.)
- The links to the spec are here. (Trade secrets/nda no longer apply. This is the problem with using trade secrets to protect your stuff.)
- If I point a coding assistant (assume open weights/source) at this thread, and a copy of linux main, it can probably just fix the damn driver.
- I could probably publish my patch with a big fat “only for use with licensed hdmi hardware, not for resale” disclaimer on it.
At that point, what law would I have broken?
The problem is that software distributors might break laws if the said drivers lands on unlicensed hdmi hardware, so they should be liable to check if the hardware is properly licensed, which might generate headaches.
Or maybe lawyers cannot anticipate everything that happens in court, so it just feels better to do things properly and not try to circumvent laws, especially when you're valve. It's better to not take risks.
I suspect Valve's plan is to embarrass the license holder in the hope that they back down. I doubt a court battle would be worth the money.
Either that or just wait out the problem. As long as the linux gaming market keeps growing the incitaments for the hardware people to change their minds will increasingly be there.
What the (hardware) people want doesn't matter, at least as long as the IP owners have the deeper pockets.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a pretty universal saying, and it also applies here - the rational thing for MAFIAA et al would be to give up and engage in universal licensing schemes similar to the lesson the music industry learned well over a decade ago. There, you have virtually every single mainstream artist/band available everywhere... Apple Music, Youtube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz and I'm sure I forgot a bunch. Piracy in music has all but vanished as a result.
We could have had that with Netflix, and a lot of IP catalogs actually were on Netflix, but because of naked greed it all splintered up, and everyone is running their own distinct streaming silos again.
The problem is, while Valve has balls of tungsten... MAFIAA et al have the money, much much more of it.
It makes a good underdog story, but unless Valve goes all-in and flashes a notification to every American Steam user "hey, write to your Congress reps to pass a law to fix this shit, and call their office every day until they publicly relent", no PR can force their hand. It took many years for Right to Repair bills to pass, and many of these only succeeded because the people pushing for it (aka farmers) are very well connected to their representatives and have very deep pockets of money.
The other solution is of course mass protests over civil disobedience to outright violence. That can work to force change as well, we've seen many a law changed in the past (most recently at scale during the Covid pandemic), but I don't see any big-tent movement going on against big-co extortion practices.
> The problem is that software distributors might break laws if the said drivers lands on unlicensed hdmi hardware
Assuming the diatributor doesn't claim the software or device is hdmi licensed, what laws would they be breaking?
Would it be feasible for a driver patch to be shared via e.g. an anonymous torrent, with a checksum (to certify authenticity) held somewhere more reliable, like GitHub?
Sounds like what we used to go through years ago with sound editors that had to have a separate button for downloading and inserting the MP3 encoder because the Fraunhofer license prohibited it from being directly distributed with the software.
This is still the case in Audacity... doesn't rip mp3's out the box.
Sure it does, it just always relied on external encoders.
I use audacity for recording vinyl occasionally, but for CD audio I have a bunch of cli scripts. Much easier.
If those external encoders are there. That’s the “non-free” checkbox / package in Linux.
Post the patch in a country that doesn't care? I remember OpenBSD used to do something similar with encryption to get around US laws.
I think Canonical did this with codecs for a long time too, behind a prompt
Linux mint didn't need to ask due to being released from France, where software patents did not apply.
Maybe nothing, but can you afford to prove that in court?
I need to post this everywhere:
THIS ISN'T AN IP/PATENT ISSUE!
This is branding and marketing issue. Anyone can implement the spec, it doesn't need to be a cleanroom implementation. It's almost certain that you could license the patents from the patent holders because HDMI doesn't develop it's own patentable stuff, they just get it from Sony, Panasonic, etc.
THIS IS A MARKETING / BRANDING ISSUE.
Saying they don't want an open source implementation is just a smokescreen. 99% of the implementation is in hardware anyway.
So you're saying they could just make the driver compliant without advertising compliance under the hdmi logo? similar to how e.g. oneplus shipped phones without advertising their higher IPX rating because certification would have cost too much, or chinese electronics supporting "tf card" instead of "micro sd card" but being compatible anyways
If you take the effort to anonymise your contributions, can they afford to try to find you?
It’s not about individual users. It’s about Valve redistributing it.
This affects 100% of linux boxes with an hdmi port, so valve is making a tiny fraction of the impacted hardware.
My point was that the HDMI Foundation/Org isn’t going after hobbyists at home.
But if a hobbyist were to sell an unlicensed HDMI 2.1 box then the IP holder would likely go after them.
In their eyes, in that case, the IP is being pirated.
This is very similar to h.264 however however in that case the standard is public, commercial use requires paying a fee. Licensing of the HDMI 2.1 specification requires an NDA for specification testing that Valve is not able to perform in order to say that it is a HDMI 2.1 compliant system. They would be running afoul of the HDMI org’s licensing terms.
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.
So should HDCP. And DMCA. And platforms. And DRM in general.
But this is basically asking for the USA to give up on their soft power (Hollywood, and over the Internet). It's something to aim for, but is still going to take decades.
And you have to be careful about what might fill the power void (China, Russia...)
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.
Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH.
It's sad what people put up with now.
These are standard business practices. They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". People throw a tantrum because money. Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.
I understand the ideas behind open source, and I think they are excellent. But I also understand that people and the businesses they operate want to make money.
> They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP".
The general premise of patents and copyrights is that you're going to do some development work and then you get an exclusive right that yields a competitive advantage.
Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device.
There is no competitive advantage to be had because the very premise is that everyone possible is going to implement it to maximize the network effect. And the entire industry has the incentive to want the standard to be good and put whatever good ideas they have into it because they're all stuck with it if it isn't. Meanwhile because of the network effect, everyone has to implement the standard because if they come up with their own thing -- even if it's better -- it wouldn't be compatible.
So all of the normal incentives from copyrights and patents are wrong. You can't gain a competitive advantage from it, companies have a preexisting incentive to make it good even without an exclusive right, and someone who doesn't want to pay doesn't have the option to try to do better on their own because of the network effect. And the network effect makes it an antitrust concern.
The result is that NDAs and royalties on standards are just a shakedown and the law shouldn't allow them.
> Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device.
I do think there's value and a lot of work in coming up with a standard that manufacturers agree on. It's a huge coordination problem, based on the idea of unlinking a standard's success with the success of, say, a hardware competitor. It's real work! And like.... HDMI is an invention, right? If that isn't then what is?
"we should have drivers for the hardware that relies on this tech" just feels like an obvious win to me though. The (short-term) ideal here is just the forum being like "yes it's good if HDMI 2.1 works on linux" and that being the end of the story
I don't have much love for things that mean that like VGA info online all being "we reverse engineered this!!!" so they're not my friends but I wouldn't succeed much at standards coordination
> I do think there's value and a lot of work in coming up with a standard that manufacturers agree on. It's a huge coordination problem, based on the idea of unlinking a standard's success with the success of, say, a hardware competitor. It's real work!
It's work they would be doing anyway because they all benefit from it, which is why it isn't a coordination problem. The known and effective coordination solution is a standards body. Everyone sends their representative in to hash out how the standard should work. They all have the incentive to do it because they all want a good standard to exist.
Moreover, the cost of developing the standard is a minor part of the total costs of being in the industry, so nobody has to worry about exactly proportioning a cost which is only a rounding error to begin with and the far larger problem is companies trying to force everyone else to license their patents by making them part of the standard, or using a standard-essential patent to impose NDAs etc.
> And like.... HDMI is an invention, right? If that isn't then what is?
It's not really a single invention, but that's not the point anyway.
Patenting something which is intrinsically necessary for interoperability is cheating, because the normal limit on what royalties or terms you can impose for using an invention is its value over the prior art or some alternative invention, whereas once it's required for interoperability you're now exceeding the value of what you actually invented by unjustly leveraging the value of interoperating with the overall system and network effect.
> HDMI is an invention, right?
DVI was an invention.
HDMI just added DRM on top of it.
That's definitely a thing that happened, but it's minimising so much other important work that it's misrepresenting the whole thing.
Do you know how much bandwidth six channels of uncompressed audio needs? Home theaters would be a HUGE hassle without a single cable doing all that work for you.
ADAT Lightpipe supports up to 8 audio channels at 48 kHz and 24 bits - all using standard off-the-shelf Toslink cables and transceivers. MADI can do significantly more.
Let's not pretend surround sound is a nearly-impossible problem only HDMI could possibly solve.
I would say a fair compensation for the original work is fair, until certain threshold, after which they must invent new thing rather than continued benefit of an existing. Say once they earned 400% of valuation or cost of invention or similar. there could be a system in place. But of course the people to regulate this has a natural bias, as they themselves would be hurt by it, most likely. So the vast majority, ie. the public is at an disadvantage, greed wins again.
Where does "invention" end and "standard" begin? If I come up with a new and better way to transmit video between devices, should I be allowed to charge for the right to interoperate with it? What if I don't want any interoperability and it's just for my own hardware? What if I just want certain select partners?
>Should I be allowed to charge for the right to interoperate with it?
No.
>What if ... just for my own hardware?
No.
>What if I just want certain select partners?
Sure, you can select between the DoD or Langley.
So anything which communicates between two pieces of hardware wouldn’t be covered by IP laws?
Yes. It seems pretty obviously true to me that there should be no legal right to prevent interoperability and no recourse against adversarial interoperability.
The right to say "Compatible with X" or similar where X is a brand should also be protected.
So I sit down and invent some wonderful new interconnect. It would be be a big advantage to put it into certain kinds of video equipment. I don't make any video equipment, so I license it to companies that do. Should this be impossible? New communications tech should only be created as trade secrets, by industry-wide consortia, or altruists?
This is getting close to arguing against IP as a general concept. Which I don't really object to very strongly, but presenting it as a special carveout for communication doesn't make sense to me.
[flagged]
Like the IETF, you mean? If I want to implement general internet-compatible timestamps, RFC3339 is right here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339.
How about something big: TCP? RFC9293. It's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293.
HTML? Different organisation but the same idea, it's over here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
You're reading this web page because of standards organisations that gave everything away for free for anyone to implement.
> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.
This would only make sense if there _wasn't_ free video standards competing with HDMI. How is it that one group managed to do this for free yet the other group charges clearly exorbitant rates for a nearly equivalent product.
> They own IP.
That isn't nearly as valuable as they say it is. They only do this to prevent piracy and not to promote any useful technical standard.
> People want to use that IP.
People are _forced_ to because the same group practically gives away their technology under certain conditions so their connectors get added to nearly every extant device. I don't _want_ to use HDMI. I'm simply _forced_ to through market manipulation.
> want to make money.
Selling drugs would earn them more money. Why don't we tolerate that? It could be, under some torturous logic, be just another "standard business practice." In fact looking at our laws I see tons of "standard business practices" that are now flatly illegal.
The law is a tool. It can be changed. It should be changed. The citizens pay for 85% of it and while businesses only pay 7%. Why do their "standard practices" hold a candle to the "needs of the citizens."
It all stems from the companies behind the HDMI authority. It's basically all of the major AV device makers circa early 2000s. They wrote the spec and added it to all of their products. Displayport wasn't around just yet so HDMI just beat it to market. Since everyone needed an HDMI thing to go with their HDMI thing, everyone else jumped on the HDMI bandwagon. Although I'm really not sure how HDMI managed to get it's way into PCs. Displayport should have just cornered the entire market, it's very popular on business-class machines. I'm guessing it's because of HTPCs and people wanting to put big TVs on their PCs is what led to the adoption.
I think the HDMI connectors popped up at the same time screens switched from 16:10 (VESA compatible at the time) to 16:9 to be more cost effective for the manufacturers. But I’m not sure why. I looked at graphicscards and wondered why HDMI suddenly gained traction in the PC space even after the release of DisplayPort. I think this should never have happened.
Same thing applies to PCI. I can get USB specs for free from USB-IF. But the PCI and PCIe specs cost $4000 plus. Just so I can write my own PCI driver. Legally, I mean. Oh, there is external references, but what if I want the authoritative documentation? Should I have to pay thousands and thousands for access (!) to a standard that is ubiquitous in every sense of the word? There is, to me, a point at which ubiquity trumps any "IP rights" the standards org would have.
What free video standards are competing with HDMI? DisplayPort has its own patent pool.
How quickly everyone forgot DVI-D. Aside from non-RGB modes, hey, it's almost _exactly_ HDMI.
That’s true for earlier iterations, but definitely not for an actual HDMI 2.1 signal. I think you can still connect to a DVI-D monitor and the source will automatically downgrade, but I haven’t tried it in a very long time.
DVI-D doesn't carry audio; HDMI can do a bunch of uncompressed channels simultaneously.
Yes, and we should say "no more making money from stupid things like secret technical standards"
Copyright and patent protection is afforded under the principle that said protections grant concurrent value to the people as is granted to the holder of the rights. Stuff like HDMI specs gatekeeping simply allows a select group of people to exploit licensing and seek rent. It doesn't provide any benefit to the people of the US whatsoever, and the fundamental principle by which the rights were granted is violated.
Copyright and patent protection is intended to incentivize and reward creativity, not to allow conglomerates of IP hoarders and patent trolls to exploit legal gotchas, to allow endless rent seeking, or empower megacorps to mass file endless vague patents so as to provide endless legal challenges to small competitors.
Copyright and patent law as currently implemented and practiced are fundamentally broken and far diverged from any principled, meaningful benefit to the people.
There are what, 2 publishers now? Five nines of commercially viable patents go to megacorps and universities? Seven nines of all music and media belong to conglomerates of one sort or another? Something like that.
I understand the intent of the original implementations of copyright, and maybe the laws even made sense for a few years, but either they were corrupt from the start, or they were so badly written that they never had a shot at achieving any sort of meaningful ROI for the price paid by the public.
How much money could PCI SIG possibly be making for the rightsholders with those fees? They’re not charged to members, they’re not per-seat (so each company only needs to pay once even if they have 100 engineers that need to read it), and they don’t include patent licenses for shipping actual hardware. Nobody’s business model is threatened even slightly by making the standards public.
And as we saw with AV1 vs H.265, the IP encumbrance of multiparty standards can create barriers that kill their adoption and the corresponding ability for rightsholders to make money off them. It looks like that family of encodings is going to die off, with basically zero interest from anybody in licensing H.266 when you’ll be able to build AV2 software and hardware for free.
> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.
Are you sure that's what's in play here? I don't think anyone gives a shit about using HDMI. They want video and audio to work on their TV.
Now tell me how many TVs with non-HDMI ports are out there, and tell me with a straight face that it isn't due to pressure from the "consortium".
Edit: by the way the video signaling was identical between DVI and HDMI in the beginning. So whose hard work was it?
"Hard work" is the worst way to make money at scale, so that argument rings more than just a little hollow, especially when defending access control based moneymaking.
Anti competitive "standard business practices" should be counteracted with good enough competition law that forbids them. As simple as that. So I totally agree with the above comment. They simply shouldn't be able to prevent open implementations.
When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes.
"if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"
I think the answer is probably no for most people.
Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier).
This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money.
This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.
> "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"
Only if you want people to use it. Developing a protocol is an investment in defining the direction a technology follows; the benefits are not best accrued by charging for access to the standard, but rather by leveraging the ability to direct the trend.
The alternative is that the licensing charge causes a bunch of stupid friction and prevents the standard from being truly universal.
EDIT: Implementing a standard is enough work, paying for the privilege to do so is often a non-starter.
> "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"
This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.
Devil's Advocate time. Would the result of that be better or worse quality public standards?
(I don't actually know what I think off the cuff - but it's the obvious follow on question to your statement and I don't think your statement can stand on it's own without a well argued counter)
It's a fine question. I think the onus is on public regulatory bodies responsible for the standards; if they aren't able to pay for the work to be published as an open standard, it wasn't worth the cost.
Standards also benefit the industry as a whole, and it's generally in the interests of the companies involves to participate in the standardisation process anyway. Charging for the description of them is just a cherry on top (compared to e.g. licensing any relevant patents), I don't believe it's at all required to incentivize a standardization process.
(this is of course looking at interoperation standards - regulatory bodies are going to be more concerned with e.g. safety standards)
> This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.
Define "public standard". And how is HDMI one of them?
HDMI is a private bundle of IP that the license holders are free to give (or not give) to anyone. We're not talking about a statue by a government 'of the people' what should be public. No one is mandated by any government to implement it AFAICT: and even if it was, it would be up to the government to make sure they only reference publicly available documents in laws.
The HDMI Forum isn't "most people", it's a non-profit run by some of the largest companies in the space that self describes this way.[1]
I think it is reasonable to complain when "someone" is being so hypocritical and arguably engaging in anti-competitive practices. How do the crazy NDAs in any way server the self stated mission of the forum?
> [1] https://hdmiforum.org/about/
Chartered as a nonprofit, mutual benefit corporation, the mission of the HDMI Forum is to:
Create and develop new versions of the HDMI Specification and the Compliance Test Specification, incorporating new and improved functionality
Encourage and promote the adoption and widespread use of its Specifications worldwide
Support an ecosystem of fully interoperable HDMI-enabled products
Provide an open and non-discriminatory licensing program with respect to its SpecificationsThe idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers.
And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is.
If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.
US did the same in the 19th century with Europe and it's part of how the country bootstrapped it's industrial revolution.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...
It’s the same entitlement that determined one could just download all the content available online to train your models against.
People would have far fewer problems with that if the resulting models were also released back to the general public.
Weird to call it entitlement when the natural state of information is to be free. What's entitled is asking the government to enforce arbitrary restrictions on other people making use of some information that you somehow intangibly "own."
(Of course, it's fucked up that corporations can siphon up all this content and then try to twist the law to carve out an exception for their extra special use case. Information still isn't free unless you're an AI company, I guess.)
There's a difference between "infringing IP[1]", "stealing IP", and whatever we should call AI training. And it turns out the worse the behavior gets, the less likely the law is going to recognize it as bad.
IP infringement is what we're used to talking about. This is when I go and give a stranger a copy of some music I don't own. Or when some sketchy ass guy resells IPTV services to an entire island in Greece or whatever. They're not saying it's their work, they're just refusing to pay the appropriate licensing fee for it. And sometimes we might even agree that a license fee shouldn't have to be paid. What the Linux video driver people want is for the HDMI people to say "yes, you can tell people how to light up this video card in such a way that it successfully negotiates a connection at HDMI 2.1 bitrates", which shouldn't even be infringement at all, but here we are.
What China does is wholesale IP theft. They don't just make their own version of someone else's thing, or just do industrial espionage, they actively make an attempt to deny the original creator of their own work. This can include things like forcing foreign entities to go through a JV, or playing games with trademark law to allow domestic companies to actually take legal ownership over foreign works. This is why a lot of American companies spent time and money carrying water for Xi Jinping, despite it going against everything they claimed to stand for.
AI training doesn't fit in either mold. It's more like rugpulling human labor by turning know-how and creativity into ownable capital distinct from that of traditional copyright and patents. Copyright gives you ownership over your own work, but says nothing about having your entire craft being automated away by a robot that can turn your work into legally distinct knockoffs of it[0]. So we have an entirely new form of enclosure of the commons, where if you ever do a thing, someone else can turn that thing into their own property that everyone else can pay to rent. Like, to be clear: AI is not Napster. AI is the opposite of Napster. AI is the apotheosis of "you will own nothing and be happy".
[0] The only way that copyright claims on AI even sort of fit into recognizable harms is the fact that at some point a Facebook engineer pointed LLaMA's crawler at a torrent site. In fact, I kinda hate how this is sort of saying "well actually fair use only applies if you bought the book first". Which is a problem, because the condition of sale can be "don't make a fair use of it", and the only way to avoid that was to pirate the work and then make your fair use.
[1] As Cory Doctorow said, paraphrasing: Intellectual property is the laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors.
Exactly. Proprietary, encumbered bullshit shouldn't be accepted as a standard. Period.
This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.
> This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.
The same conditions apply to everyone: they do not discriminate—the ND in FRAND—open versus closed source. Everyone gets the same contract/NDA to sign.
If there was one contract/NDA for closed source, and another for open source, that would be discriminatory.
It's non-discriminatory, except for the part where the one contract is written in such a way as to exclude certain groups of potential users?
It's like making a law which forbids anyone without gold-threaded clothing from entering certain parts of the city: it doesn't discriminate against the poor, anyone with the right outfit can enter! Oh, poor people can't afford gold-threaded clothing? Sorry, that's just an unfortunate coincidence, nothing we can do about that...
Those potential users are self-imposing on themselves the need to be open source. There are no external, out-of-their-control factors making them 'be' open source (like there are with being poor, a certain gender, etc).
And for the record I do think it would there should be an (open source) HDMI 2.1 implementation in the Linux kernel, but I recognize the same IP law that protects HDMI licensing also allows enforcement of GPL/BSD licenses:
> Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
From the article:
> At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements.
I wonder on what basis. Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?
> Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?
> As I understand, there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs. (Is that still true in 2025?)
As far as I am aware VLC Media Player is capable of playing blu ray dics:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/how_to...
but you have to install some additional files:
> https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Usage:Blu-ray/
> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/commen...
If this does not satisfy your claim "there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs" tell me where I am wrong.
Hat tip. I was unaware. When I looked deeper, it requires you to supply the encryption keys for each disc. I highly doubt this method is "approved" by the Blu-Ray consortium. I don't even know the legality in highly advanced economies.
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.
> and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues
Honest answer (since your not trolling): The difference is more of time than anything else. If I somehow find $5000 to buy access to the PCIe spec, my understanding is that it's per access request. NVMe doesn't charge at all for their specifications; instead, you can join for just $500 per year last time I checked.
He's claiming they wouldn't be developed because why develop a standard you can't cash in on.
Which is silly, specifically for telecoms, because get don’t make their money on the standard, they make it on providing the service.
In the telecom world, that would be a pretty terrible business model, as the list of entities who would need a copy of the standard is relatively short.
The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards. It makes sense to want to make money on the thing you work on.
> The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards
Are they? Usually these standards consortiums are composed of the companies that develop products based on the standards, where their products gain value from having a standard (a Blu-ray player and a TV with no way to connect them together is worth less). Even if they couldn't gatekeep the standards they would still have developed them out of necessity.
There is no business developing standards. All the technical parts are written by engineers from the various companies wanting to implement the standard. All that's left for the standards association is to host a mailing list and potentially organise some in-person meetings. And hosting the resulting PDF doesn't exactly cost $4000 / download either.
That's what patents are for. The handful of standards that actually cost money to produce (i.e. MPEG, 3GPP, LTE etc) have patent holders that are specifically required to provide "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" licensing terms. If paywalling the spec paid for those standards we wouldn't have had a decade of HTML5 video not specifying a baseline codec.
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?
Bad example, the 3GPP standards are not at all closed like HDMI 2.1 is, unlike HDMI 2.1 there are open source implementations https://osmocom.org/projects
Are you referring to the 3GPP specifications that you, I or anyone else can go and read absolutely free of charge?
> 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 had 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.
Funny enough... HDMI CEC is still not perfect in my experience. For the longest time, if I powered on my Mac mini and not power on the TV manually, it would actually cause the TV to crash and force a reboot. It was really strange behavior.
Is there any reason CEC can't be implemented over DisplayPort?
There shouldn't be. DP already is a half-duplex, bidirectional AUX channel running at 1 Mbps.
> 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
I don't know. I have an LG TV and it does not support turning the display on/off with HDMI CEC. Everything else seems to work but it intentionally ignores those commands.
Have you turned off SIMPLINK? (LG's older name for CEC).
Option 1 (Hidden Menu Method)
* Press the Mute button repeatedly until the hidden menu appears; ensure Auto Power Sync is enabled.
* Go to General → Devices → TV Management and disable Quick Start+.
* Go to General → System → Additional Settings → Home Settings and turn off both options.
Option 2 (Settings Menu Method, webOS)
* Press Settings on the remote and open All Settings.
* Navigate to General → Devices.
* Turn SIMPLINK (HDMI-CEC) ON. (webOS 6.0+, enabling SIMPLINK automatically enables external device control).
No, it is enabled. Other CEC commands like changing the active input work.
[Older] LG TVs do not implement CEC Standby command. You need a hardware mod: https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec/issues/363#issuecommen...
That's too bad. It's only about five years old now. Old but not unreasonably old.
Brightness control on external monitors has never been supported in Windows though, partially due to issues with displays that have poor write endurance on internal storage.
It might not be an "internal windows" tool, but I have controlled an ancient monitor (I think over VGA?) using a 3rd part app on windows. The buttons had broken, but software control worked just fine.
Monitor brightness is controlled over CEC which is just i2c. Windows most certainly supports this on an OS level.
Yes, I've used this in the past:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/highleve...
As long as you are okay with a 1-3m long cable.
Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPort 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
In fact I’ve used a 100 foot fiber optic DisplayPort cable that I “just bought” on Amazon, admittedly for a LOT of money (like, I think it was about $100 USD, 3 years ago or so).
I just wish they sold the transceivers separately from the fiber. Being able to use any random length of cheap off-the-shelf SMF/MMF fiber would be so much more convenient than having to get a custom one-off cable.
They exist for medium-speed HDMI (see for example [0]), but I haven't seen them for modern high-speed DP yet.
https://www.amazon.com/Converter-Extender-Transceiver-module...
That's not actually such a bad price. I didn't know they even made these - cool!
You say it's a LOT, but it's about the same cost as a much much shorter USB 4.0 cable. (Granted, it also has to be able to carry 240W.)
Huh, I thought I had mine earlier. Mine was from May 2021. They were very very new and had very few reviews, and it was $56. For a 100' fiber optic cable that promised 8k60 and was light.
This cable is absurdly long. I have no idea how to coil it nicely. At my last place I had three stories, and would sometimes just dangle most of it down to the ground then wind it up from the roof.
I hate noise from the PC, so I've sited my PC under the desk at the opposite end of the room to where I sit (so about 3.5m away). I have a pair of 5m DP cables running to my 2 ultrawide monitors without any problems at all, so it seems if you buy decent cables it just works with DP too.
The only potential issue is that they seem to be slow waking up from sleep. I've never been interested enough to investigate if moving the PC closer with shorter cables fixes that, or whether it's just an issue with having 2 monitors. I think the underlying cause is actually just because it's Windows and that one monitor (they're supposed to be identical) seems to wake up earlier than the other, so it briefly flashes on, then goes black while it reconfigures for 2 screens and then on again.
But anyway, my 5m cable runs seem fine. They weren't especially expensive nor especially cheap cables, IIRC around 10-15 GBP each.
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
You wouldn't pirate a car, why would you pirate a driver!
> You wouldn't pirate a car, why would you pirate a driver!
I wouldn't steal a car, but I would copy one or download one from the internet and 3D-print it.
Yea, IMO piracy is a misnomer. To steal something (or Pirate) you would have to take something which causes the original to disappear from the owner.
But Piracy isnt that, you create an unlawful copy, but you didnt steal (IMO)
Which is why i cant participate in the "Is AdBlocker Piracy" debate, because for me, not even piracy is piracy :P
If they have a working driver since 2 years ago, couldn't they just release it to the community? I imagine most gamers would typically be capable/ok with that.
Are they rejecting the driver because of it being open source? There are specific modules I use in my AMD card that require closed proprietary driver add-ons for example such as AMF.
Not defending the HDMI forum here, but perhaps Valve / AMD have a way of including a proprietary blob in SteamOS (I don't think most gamers would care)
>Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification.
So just drop off a patch somewhere by "accident" and have someone else merge it. What are they gonna do?
I'd rather buy a 65-75" computer monitor and put it in my living room.
I just don't care about the other things in a TV - I don't want smarts, I don't want speakers, I no longer need a tuner.
The pixel density, among other things, are very different between a TV and a Monitor. This is why a monitor of similar size will be vastly more expensive than a TV - they're optimized for different viewing experiences/use-cases.
For a simple example, a TV usually assumes the viewer isn't sitting just inches away from it...
There are differences but man you for sure picked the most incorrect one - 4K say 42" OLED TV and same dimension PC gaming screen have exactly same pixel density, there is no subspace magic.
I'm not a gamer, so honest question: what is PITA with HDMI for gamers?
Before HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort already supports high refresh rates (greater than 120Hz) at high resolutions. Also many high-end PC graphics cards offer more DisplayPort ports than HDMI.
I think most graphics cards nowadays come with roughtly 3 DP ports and 1 HDMI port. It might be different for things like the Multi-media cards that are on the low-low end of the spectrum (think of GT 730 level in a generation) might have more HDMI ports since they are more intended for such an audience.
I'm switching to DisplayPort
That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort is a massive reason I think they deserve to have their building surrounded by angry people with pitchforks and torches. Anti-competitive abusers, doing awful things to prevent a better world.
DisplayPort actually makes sense as a digital protocol, where-as HDMI inherits all the insane baggage of the analog past & just sucks. HDMI is so awful.
No, they don't put DP on because every $ of hardware they fit to the TV needs to provide value. DP requires a large board component that may need manual handling, circuit traces (+ decoupling) and silicon on the chip to interface. It then requires software support in the stack and that needs testing/validation.
The percentage of people who will actually use DP to connect their TV vs HDMI is tiny. Even people who do have DisplayPort on their monitors will often times connect it with HDMI just because it's the more familiar connector. I spent a decade working in that area and we literally were debating about spending cents on devices that retailed for hundreds, or thousands. The secondary problem that drives that is that ~90% of TVs sold use the same family of chips from MStar, so even if you wanted to go off-track and make something special, you can only do it from off-the-shelf silicon unless you pay a fortune for your own spin of the silicon. If you want to do that then you better commit to buying >1m chips or they won't get out of bed.
HDMI forum was founded by mostly TV manufacturers, they're not interested in constraining the market in that way. It's all just been market consolidation and making TVs cheaper through tighter integration.
Oh wow, that explains a lot, I sort of always figured it was just market momentum that meant you never see tv's with a display port. sort of like
... we need a digital video link
VESA develops DVI
... market gap for tv's identified
hdmif develops HDMI which is DVI with an audio channel
... while technically a minor feature that audio link was the killer feature for digital tv's and led to hdmi being the popular choice for tv's
VESA develops displayport a packet(vs streaming for DVI and hdmi) based digital link, it's packet nature allows for several interesting features including sending audio, and multiple screens.
... no tv's use it, while display port is better than hdmi it is not better enough to make a difference to the end user and so hdmi remains normal for tv's, you can find a few computer monitor with DP but you have to seek them out.
I will have to see if there is some sort of stupid "additional licensing cost" if a tv is produced with displayport, that would explain so much. I don't claim that there are no tv's with DP but I certainly have never seen one.
> That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort
Wait what?! This would be jaw-dropping anticompetitive behavior. Could you source this statement?
Well HDMI is better than all the standards I used before it. Never did something with DisplayPort but for what I can tell it's Apple related (right?). I used DVI-I, DVI-D, VGA, and even old stuff in the past.
There is the vesa standards organization with a pretty good history of successful display connections standards vga(analog video) dvi(digital video) and displayport(packet video) and very little drama affecting the end user with how the connection is used.
Contrast this with the hdmi consortium which put together the hdmi standard. originally hdmi was just dvi with a built in audio channel. and while I will concede that the audio channel was a killer feature and resulted in the huge success of hdmi. They really did very little technical work and what work they did do was end user hostile (hdcp rights management)
It really is too bad that display-port is sort of relegated to computer monitors as it is better designed and less end user hostile than hdmi. but hdmi with it's built in audio channel won the market for digital video connections and by the time display port was out people were, understandably, reluctant to switch again. While display port is better, it is not enough better to be for the end user to care.
Have you even bothered reading any discussion here? I can't downvote you but its easy to see why others did so, a very lazy and clueless comment about very basic of tech everybody uses, on Hacker news. You can for sure do better.
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/
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)
No, but now that you mention it, I'm curious about the five posts to the official US Federal Bureau of Prisons Instagram[1], which, unlike their Facebook and Twitter accounts, is private.
(No relation, just the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of an organization that I wouldn't expect to have much of a social media presence.)
The funny thing of course is that the Steam Machine has DisplayPort, and you can easily get a DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle for $20 retail. But they are targeting this being a console, and those are hooked to TVs over HDMI so it seems lame to not have a built-in HDMI port.
This is mostly an academic exercise though. HDMI 2.0 does 4K @ 60hz, and Valve have 4K @ 120hz (with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling) working over it too. Given the CPU/GPU in this machine, it won't be able to push higher than those limits anyway.
The more pertinent issue is that many TVs will only do VRR over HDMI 2.1, and many active DP to HDMI 2.1 adapters won't pass VRR through either.
That's also why the Switch 2 supports VRR on its internal display but not when connected to a TV - the dock can't encode a HDMI 2.1 signal. That's just Nintendo being Nintendo though, they could support it if they wanted to.
Only if the adapter is active; passive ones just tell the GPU to switch protocols to HDMI or whatever, so those are still kneecapped by driver limitations.
Edit: I just checked Amazon and active adapters are a lot cheaper (and less niche) than they used to be, though there are still some annoying results like a passive adapter which has an LED to indicate the connection is "active" being the first result for "DP to HDMI 2.1 active".
For some reason that DisplayPort is only 1.4. That's only ~26 Gigabit/s. While HDMI 2.1 is ~48 Gigabit/s.
You can make up some difference with DSC, but I think that requires the display to support it: dongles won't decode it.
Club3D makes some dongles that will convert from DP 1.4 with DSC to HDMI 2.1, actually. The only ones I've used personally are physically USB-C (DP alt mode) on the DP end, though. But they make some that are mDP and have DSC support as well, and they might also have one for full-sized DP, although I bet it requires external power.
Edit: The article claims that a good Club3D adapter for this has disappeared. Yeah, there is an old Club3D adapter (CAC-1085) for this and it's not around anymore (and it does require external power!). But it's been superseded by a newer one (CAC-1088) which is still available on Amazon, at least in the US. (And the new one is bus-powered.)
From the manufacturer: https://www.club-3d.com/shop/cac-1088-1223
on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4FTWLCJ
I'm guessing the DisplayPort is there to support the original Valve Index directly.
I have my high end PC connected to a TV so it ruins my chances of ever switching to Linux. But yes for the Steam box this doesn't matter.
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).
> Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest
I'm pretty sure they also moved a lot of stuff to a closed source user-space component, right?
This quote from that readme also seems to indicate a required user-space component that I'm pretty sure is not open sourced?
> Note that the kernel modules built here must be used with GSP firmware and user-space NVIDIA GPU driver components from a corresponding 590.44.01 driver release
The closed-source user-space component isn't new, the drivers always contained a kernel module and user-space libraries. Those libraries provide an OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. It's equivalent to Mesa for AMD and Intel GPUs (and the kernel driver is equivalent to amdgpu and i915 respectively).
Since it's closed we can't really know for sure if anything was moved to it from the kernel, but I think it's quite unlikely something like HDMI link setup was moved to user-space instead of to firmware.
And IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.
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.
It most likely would prevent you from playing anything HDCP. HDCP is illegal (?) to reverse engineer, and there are special versions of HDCP2 specifically for HDMI. You need a license and a verified device for HDCP.
That might not matter much for an ordinary PC, but this Steam Machine will be competing for the living room with the PS5 and Xbox which have Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc; Not sure if things like Spotify are HDCP-protected.
It will be interesting to see how Valve works out the kinks for that. Honestly in general it'll be interesting, because putting those things on Steam Store basically turns Steam Store into a general software store instead of a game store. And the only cross-platform store at that.
With iOS and Android being broken open, you could have games be completely cross-licensed. I'd say other software too, but sadly with everything going the subscription model, you usually already have cross-licensing, in the form of an account.
How does HDCP work over DisplayPort? I guess HDCP is a different spec from HDMI itself?
Yes, HDCP is seperate from HDMI and DP.
The source and the sink need a HDCP-licence. Both devices have embbed keys that get exchanged to estabish a encrypted channel. Without the licence you can't get the required key material.
AFAIK, you can even sell HDMI devices without HDCP. Practically though, every entertainment device needs HDCP support.
Part of what you're paying for is the right to use the trademarked tern HDMI, just like how the USB Consortium charges you stupid money to use the USB logo.
The suit over usage of "HDMI" in a reverse engineered version would wind up arguing whether or not HDMI is a genericised term and the HDMI Forum would lose their trademark. They will throw every cent they have into preventing such a decision and it'll get ugly
Can't you use a trademark to refer to the thing as long as it's clear you're not claiming to be them? Like if you say your PC is "IBM compatible" you're not claiming to be IBM, are you?
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.
It's called nominative use, and describing a thing as "HDMI compatible" is permitted.
One doesn't get to use the logo or even the typeface, but that's not a dealbreaker at all for the purposes being discussed here. Words themselves are OK (and initialisms, such as "HDMI," are just a subset of words like nouns and verbs are).
The wiki has some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
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.
> 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.
Isn't that actually a pretty good workaround? Hardware vendor pays for the license, implements the standard, sells the hardware. Linux kernel has a compatible implementation, relying on the first sale doctrine to use the patent license that came with the hardware, and then you could run it on any hardware that has the port (and thereby the license). What's the problem?
> relying on the first sale doctrine to use the patent license that came with the hardware
First-sale doctrine protects against copyright or trademark infringement. You might be thinking of "patent exhaustion"[1], which is a mostly US-specific court doctrine that prevents patent holders from enforcing license terms against eventual purchasers of the patented invention. There is no "transitive law of patent licensing", so-to-speak.
In this case, it would still not protect Valve if they exercise each claim in the relevant patents by including both hardware and an unlicensed implementation of the software process. It would protect end users who purchased the licensed hardware and chose to independently install drivers which are not covered by the license.
It's murky if Valve would infringe by some DeCSS-like scheme whereby they direct users to install a third-party HDMI 2.1 driver implementation on first boot, but I don't think they would risk their existing HDMI license by doing so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
I saw chinese hw companies use "HDTV" or "HD" to avoid HDMI trademark usage.
Yep, and "HDML" on one device that would obey its user and strip HDCP from the stream when asked.
I've seen a few devices not advertising HDMI at all. Just calling it a generic "Digital Video" output.
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?
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
> 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?
nintendo tried that with the gameboy. games had to have a copy of the nintendo logo in them. i dont think it was ever tested in court though.
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.
It's sort of the other side of that coin. There was a case where a company did it like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
The courts said that was fine, and whenever that happens, lawyers are going to tell people to do it exactly like that since it's a known-good way to do it, whereas some other way is maybe and who wants a maybe if you have the option to lockstep the process that was previously approved?
Of course, if you do it a different way and then that gets approved, things change. But only after somebody actually goes to court over it, which generally nobody enjoys, not least because the outcome is uncertain.
Sure, but "can't" is a strong thing to say, when actually the result is thought to be legally untested.
So... I ask Gemini to write a technical spec and Claude Code to implement it?
Basically a week-end project...
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.
I know that HN replies must carry some substance, unlike majority of Reddit comments. But I wanted to say that this comment read line a poem to me.
Wow, full on delusional about how engineering work scales. Can't save everyone from themselves...
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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that the HDMI 2.1 port situation on TVs is, weirdly enough, a SoC limitation from a single vendor.
Almost everyone (apart from... Samsung and LG, IIRC) is using MediaTek SoC for the brains for the TVs, and they just seem to be unable to make one that has enough bandwidth for 4xHDMI 2.1.
AFAIK LG and Samsung still handle theirs in-house (and that's why LG was the very first "big" vendor to ship 2.1 at all, and they rolled it out to all four ports even on their midrange TV's in _2019_!); and it's common to see those brands have more 2.1 ports.
This should be getting better in 2025/2026 model years, since it seems MediaTek has finally managed to ship a SoC that does it; but it's ridiculous how long it's taken.
China's new HDMI replacement currently has no known benefit over HDMI in terms of protocol governance issues.
Apparently, the Hisense U8QG has DP-over-USB-C support. This might be the Trojan horse for DP in the living room.
The supported version of DisplayPort in that TV is on par (-ish) with HDMI 2.0; and not enough for HDR 4k120; which is one of the selling points of HDMI2.1.
Many TV manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum...
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?
This sounds like what microsoft did to get their Office formats standardised by ISO. Paid membership to a bunch of folk and had the vote in favour of approving the standard. (I'm summarising *a lot*, but that's the general gist of it).
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.