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HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec
- BillyTheMage 3y ago> you can't make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver because some people said so I don't understand. Fuck whatever committee said whatever crap. Open source is open source. Just make the damn driver and give the suits 2 middle fingers.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y agoContext: AMD is a company and those usually doesn't go around flipping the bird.
- dtx1 3y agoAnd it's a bit unfair to complain about AMD in this context anyway, not only were they the ones that proposed an Open Source Driver in the first place, from my experience their open source Linux support is excellent and in regards to flipping the bird, compared to NVIDIA they seem to do great up to date work with the Linux Kernel Devs. This is the HDMI Group that's being Idiots in this case because the Content Mafia is afraid someone might use this to steal content. Anyway, back to torrenting stuff...
- rickdeckard 3y agoAs a Member of HDMI-Forum AMD would surely break its Forum Membership contract by open-sourcing their implementation of a specification restricted to Members. Also, "HDMI" itself is a trademark with usage only allowed to its Members (like "Wi-Fi"), so even if a non-Member would do an open-source HDMI-implementation against the will of the HDMI-Forum, he would likely not be allowed to call it "HDMI" (like "WLAN" is used by companies without Wi-Fi Alliance Membership)
- quickthrower2 3y agoThat is a small hurdle. Just come up with a name. HD driver? If that is too close then something else. End of the day call it bollocks and since you are using hardware detection anyway who cares.
- realusername 3y agoIt would be possible to argue that both these terms are generic enough that the trademark lost its meaning, it wouldn't be the first time. WiFi is pretty much there already
- mcv 3y agoYeah, I think someone other than them would have to write that driver. But it's possible nobody who has the freedom to do so, has the knowledge to do so.
- CalRobert 3y agoI still miss DVI.
- ljm 3y agoIt was all about SCART, which is probably the only port worse than USB for having to rotate the connector several times before getting the correct orientation to insert it
- ttyyzz 3y agoThe connector (resp Port) was too chunky for laptops and you didnt get sound over dvi, but other than that it worked just Fine each and every time. Never had issues upgrading stuff from VGA to DVI in an industrial Environment back then.
- djxfade 3y agoApple had a full-size DVI connector on their PowerBook G4 series of laptops.
- swiftcoder 3y agoAll the G4 PowerBooks I remember used mini-DVI? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DVI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DVI Which is cool, but not quite as cool as micro-DVI, which they used for exactly one MacBook Air generation before mini-DisplayPort arrived on the scene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-DVI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-DVI Edit: you are right though. I just pulled up pictures on early G4 variants, and there is indeed full-size DVI. I completely forgot that.
- CalRobert 3y agoI actually like not having sound in the same cable, it has generally made life more complicated. But my use case could be different from others. Even DVI had HDCP though, so it too was flawed :-( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
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- dark-star 3y agoIf I understand it correctly, you can do that, but you cannot call it "HDMI compliant" or otherwise use the HDMI trademark.
- globular-toast 3y agoI can live without the kernel being "HDMI compliant" and coming with an HDMI logo.
- ZiiS 3y agoSomeone without contracts with the HDMI Forum can probably release a working driver. However, AMD obviously needs to license the logo for their GPU boxes and their legal team have decided this prevents them releasing any source code based on the private specification regardless of what the code is called.
- phkahler 3y ago>> However, AMD obviously needs to license the logo for their GPU boxes... It's not just that, it's about playing nice so they can have access to the next version of the spec if one comes along.
- rickdeckard 3y agoAlso, that someone without contracts would probably need to call it different than "HDMI", because the term itself is trademarked and only licensed to Members (like "Wi-Fi" and "Bluetooth"). So a different term would be needed (like "WLAN" or "BT" is used by non-members)
- franky47 3y agoCall it IDMH, I don't mind, honestly.
- RicoElectrico 3y agoOr IWCH ;-)
- fsflover 3y agoRecent discusson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291
- tener 3y agoWhat is stopping AMD from distributing a closed source binary blob along with selling the access to proprietary source code for $1?
- dagw 3y agoThe source code is not a clean room re-implementation of the the HDMI 2.1 spec and as such contains IP owned in one way or another by the HDMI Forum. This would almost certainly preclude them from distributing source code to non HDMI Forum members under any license according to what I could glean from the article.
- tener 3y agoAh, thank you, this is interesting. So in a way the original IP is kind of poison which forever taints their source code, diminishing what they can do with it.
- anthk 3y agoThe computer related companies should have given the middle finger to the media Mafiaa long ago and tell them to STFU if they ever wanted their content to be displayed in a computer with PC based standards and not MPEG. Once you get a libre OS you can dump the content of the BUS or fake whatever HDMI hardware out there to get pristine audio and video frames. Also, the current Hollywood movies are very subpar compared to what we had in the 90's, so who cares. My SO has an Amazon Prime account and yet they want to show adverts in middle of a media she already paid to be displayed without ads in theory. So, you are paying them twice. Thus, I don't consider Bittorrent piracy when you legally paid for a service but the streamers can break out the rules anytime.
- fifteen1506 3y agoSure. Try dumping SkyShowTime shows/movies then. (refuses to run on GNU/Linux). The average power user won't be able to run SkyShowTime on Linux. The idea is locking everyone on Windows, OS X or Linux with Secure Boot and verifiable boot chain if you want to watch movies or TV shows.
- realusername 3y agoThe irony is customers have a more reliable service with pirated shows nowadays, they always play and the quality doesn't change.
- anthk 3y agoCrackers will just use kvm for virtualisation and dump whatever they want either directly or over SPICE.
- fifteen1506 3y agoProbably. Though I'm still wondering why hasn't Microsoft implemented some kind of roles along Verified Boot. No-one, in Hollywood's view, should be able to watch protected content on a VM. Plus for me it's choppy. Waiting for better virtio graphics drivers for Windows (bugs exist in Visual Studio with HW accel on and there is no 3D support).
- DeathArrow 3y agoThe question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?
- salviati 3y agoIt sounds like you're not aware of the reason. I personally believe that the reson is that there are many entities pushing against open standards since they would make copying easier and DRM harder.
- DeathArrow 3y agoLimiting choice and freedom is never a good answer to an issue.
- mglz 3y agoThis is correct. That's also why there is an ongoing trend to push users into walled gardens and onto hardware they do not control. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it the "war on general-purpose computing"
- toxik 3y agoIt's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.
- tomohawk 3y agoTo expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis. When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it. The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.
- fransje26 3y agoSo, DisplayPort it is then..
- drpossum 3y agoArs Technica has to be the most careless tech news outlet and I stopped reading them long ago because of how much they just get factually wrong because of woefully inexperienced writers and to grab attention. Their first sentence is "Any Linux user trying to send the highest-resolution images to a display at the fastest frame rate is out of luck for the foreseeable future, at least when it comes to an HDMI connection" but that's plainly not true. Hardware with closed source drivers, such as the standard nvidia ones do support those because they don't have this legal limitation. Then they even end it with that possibility of closed source AMD and didn't bother even asking themselves if anyone else has done this.
- morningsam 3y agoYou're right, but on the other hand, I like that they mentioned DisplayPort as a viable alternative that doesn't suffer from the problem at hand. Not too thrilled about the exact phrasing, describing DP as "the likely best option", which is too opinionated for my taste. But I'd appreciate if other publications did this, so that e.g. every article about Microsoft's subscription model for Office 365 mentioned LibreOffice, every article about Steam users losing access to some of their games mentioned GOG, and so on. Especially when the alternatives are not well-known among one's readers.
- drpossum 3y agoPhoronix is the place to be for coverage of this type https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
- emersion 3y agoA possible workaround for users is to use an active HDMI adapter, e.g. a USB-C dock or DisplayPort → HDMI converter.
- geraldhh 3y agoare you implying that DP-HDMI cables have some active components in it that modifies the signal?
- Uvix 3y agoLast I checked those converters do not support HDMI 2.1 features like VRR. If the end output is HDMI 2.0 you might as well skip the middleman.
- macNchz 3y agoThere is extensive discussion about adapters in the bug report thread, it seems that some adapters do actually support HDMI 2.1 features, but it depends on their chipset and firmware version. I got a CableMatters one that seems to work, to the best of my ability to test without my TV having a diagnostic panel to show info about the signal it’s receiving. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
- emersion 3y agoThe Steam Deck dock supports this, for instance.
- redox99 3y agoLuckily with mid and high end monitors, DisplayPort is the standard. I don't understand why TVs don't come with even a single DisplayPort though. Maybe they are paid off by the HDMI forum?
- Dalewyn 3y agoMost people don't connect a computer to their TV, assuming they even have a computer at all. And assuming they do, they all have HDMI anyway. As for everything else most people would connect to their TV, they all have HDMI and precisely none have DisplayPort. Given that, supporting DisplayPort is an unnecessary expenditure on bill of materials and labor for TV manufacturers.
- raarts 3y agoIt’s a recently popular thing to use a tv as monitor.
- goosedragons 3y agoWhich all still have HDMI ports. It's pretty rare for a laptop to have DP over HDMI. Even USB C using DP alt mode is easier and cheaper to convert to HDMI. You really have to hunt for a hub with DP.
- reaperducer 3y agoIt’s a recently popular thing to use a tv as monitor. Only if you you define recently popular as "More than yesterday, but still a rounding error."
- dathinab 3y agoif yesterday is since around 5+ years because for people mainly playing games but not being over obsessed with having the most expensive fastest hardware ever using a TV as screen has been popular for a very long time, like even when I was in 12grade it was already popular and that was well over 10 years ago
- pedrocr 3y agoOn a somewhat related note, it's very surprising how hard it is to get DisplayPort out of a USB-C connection. Although DP is natively there all the cheap adapters tend to be HDMI even though that requires extra hardware to create the complex HDMI signalling out of the DP native output. So although monitors tend to have DP inputs and now everything has DP outputs in the form of USB-C it's actually hard to connect the two.
- lolinder 3y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like Amazon even creates their own off-brand USB-C to DisplayPort cable, so it doesn't seem like it's that hard. https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Aluminum-USB-C-DisplayPort-Cable/dp/B081VKXFSC/ https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Aluminum-USB-C-DisplayPo... They also have an adapter: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Aluminium-DisplayPort-Adapter-Redriver/dp/B081VKWHY2/ https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Aluminium-DisplayPort-Ad...
- pedrocr 3y agoThere are some options, particularly if you want just DisplayPort. If you want to have power as well for example pretty much all the cheap adapters are HDMI only. With HDMI there are many more options and of more reputable brands usually.
- ndespres 3y agoI was pleasantly surprised that my new Dell monitor connects with USB-C cable to to my laptop, and then lets me daisy chain another older Dell monitor off of the first one with a DisplayPort cable. I’ve got power and 2 monitors, plus a full USB-C hub, with just 1 cable into the laptop. So at least Dell has figured it out.
- notso411 3y ago[dead]
- missjellyfish 3y agoSomeone needs to reverse engineer and publish the spec ASAP. This is ridicolous.
- javier_e06 3y agoI was like: Is Google in the HDMI Board? No, neither Microsoft. https://hdmiforum.org/about/hdmi-forum-board-directors/ https://hdmiforum.org/about/hdmi-forum-board-directors/ I see people from Apple Panasonic Sony Nvidia Samsung etc. Hardware companies. Maybe you have to buy your way in the club.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hdmileaksignal 3y agoFWIU HDMI leaks signal whereas DP DisplayPort is designed to reduce emanations, anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681814#36685387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681814#36685387 Almost anti-competitive that the HDMI 2.1 spec people won't allow an open implementation. That they don't even allow open implementation should have been a red flag to all of us that HDMI 2.1 has not been subjected to sufficient review. Have any of you sufficiently reviewed an actual implementation of this spec? Only with black-box testing because it's closed source?
- lousken 3y agoit's time to call HDMI legacy, just like DSUB and DVI DP and/or USB-C + DP alt mode is the way