Displayport needs to start showing up on TVs and eventually get standards for stuff like eARC and HDMI CEC
TV OEMs are apparently part of the HDMI forum and therefore complicit.
We need EU regulation if we want to have this.
I remember when HDMI came out and then DP.
I wish I knew what was actually going on at the time with regards to licensing, I just knew they both worked and didn’t really pay much attention to things. Sometimes I’d use DP sometimes HDMI.
If I’d known, I definitely would have made a more concerted effort to support DP when it could have made a bigger difference.
Fuck hdmi
HDMI requires a license cost, DisplayPort is free.
What advantage does HDMI hold over DisplayPort?
No real technical advantage; it’s just owned by the same shitbags that dominate the TV market, so it’s the only way to connect to a lot of consumer living-room displays
This is the problem. I would switch to DP instantly but my TV only has HDMI ports.
There are DisplayPort to HDMI converters available
Pretty sure DRMed content refuses to play on those.
🏴☠️ Well 🏴☠️ I 🏴☠️ don’t 🏴☠️ care 🏴☠️
🏴☠️ Well 🏴☠️ I 🏴☠️ don’t 🏴☠️ care 🏴☠️
Random clips on the web are DRMed these days, like news articles with an embedded video. Many CMSes just DRM all clips. Totally BS but I’ve seen the video frame staying black on a bunch of sites now.
TBH you should be playing DRM content though smart TV/TV box apps anyway. Desktop Windows playback is more technically limited (for instance, no auto resolution/refresh rate switching) and aside from that you usually get a worse bitrate stream on a stuttery player.
I don’t even know about DRM playback on Linux.
People who connect TVs to the Internet only invite malware. They usually don’t receive big fixes after a few years and tend to spy on all watched content.
You should literally never use the apps built in to your TV. Unless you just really like letting the TV manufacturer know exactly what you are watching and when.
On Linux you check the box in Firefox that says Allow DRM Content and then yes, as far as I know, you need to be using laptop or a HDMI display.
Latency, desync, probably can’t do full 4k/120… just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s a viable solution.
Display port to HDMI cables are pretty good
Active ones aren’t cheap, though.
Yes HDMI forum are shitbags, but there are definitely technical advantages to HDMI. Just that I can think of, DisplayPort doesn’t have ARC (audio return for sound systems), or CEC (device can turn on TV/display, TV remote can pause movie playing on console, etc) and the max length for a DisplayPort cable is no more than 3 meters before you have to go to expensive active cables. Most of these are easy to work around for most PC setups, but if Valve wants the gabecube to easily fit into living room/TV setups, it does present a challenge.
All of these supposed advantages are solved by USB-C though. Even the length is higher (5m, I believe). I’d be fine if the DisplayPort connector is gone, but the actual standard is just better for most purposes.
HDMI has always sucked. I used DVI for the longest time, because HDMI couldn’t push enough pixels to a 1920x1200 display (topped out at 1080p for the longest time). Then jumped straight to display port when I finally got a 4k monitor.
HDMI was always 4-5 years behind other contemporary protocols, and for your trouble, you also got a stack of proprietary bullshit to go with it.
My understanding is it’s not even a licensing issue. The HDMI consortium won’t let you include features from 2.1 and 2.2 in an open source driver. it sounds like Valve would be willing to pay, but they’d have to include a closed source driver for the video card.
That’s still a licensing issue: you’re not allowed to license from the HDMI consortium and then freely sublicense to all your users, which is what open source requires. Hopefully this eventually concludes in the end of relevance for HDMI and we can have a freer, and just better ecosystem in general.
I don’t see “relevance for HDMI” ending anytime soon. Tell me how easy it is to find a TV with DP inputs. Nearly 99% of consumer gear uses HDMI.
My guess is TV compatibility. The steam machine is intended as a living room PC, connected to your TV. Most TVs only have HDMI, no DP.
I’m not sure where I got this idea, but I thought it was because Display Port doesn’t carry audio, and a single-cable solution was more appealing.
But apparently Display Port also supports audio, just none of my devices seem to recognize it…?
Apparently the only advantage of HDMI is ARC (Audio Return Channel), allowing devices to send audio back to the video source, which might be useful in some home theater setups.
I ruined my audio ports on my computer and now run my speakers through my monitor using DP, it works great!
Wow I always assumed the same thing lol
Ohh TIL, thanks! I could count the times I needed the TV to send audio back to the home theater, like if I want to watch open channels or something.
I think we could live without it, just plug an audio cable or something, fuck hdmi.
Omg is this seriously it??
Yeah pretty much. Display port is just as good but there aren’t really a lot of TVs on the market with display port because the people who own the HDMI standard are in that industry.
HDCP?
I don’t think you can send audio over DisplayPort
Funny, I have done it for years at home, I guess I am just confused
Somebody replied to other comment, but it seems like hdmi allows audio to be sent back, like, if you wanted your screen to send audio to the computer… which would be weird in most PC scenarios, but not so much on TVs.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
It’s pretty weird that this organization that exists only to extract rents from people who want to use hdmi remains unwilling to do so even for a customer as large as Valve. I wonder who has given them the motivation for it, and how much it cost them.
Their motivation is staying away from open platforms, and protecting their members’ IP rights. Gotta thwart those pirates.
AMD is nearly 100x the size of Valve, and they couldn’t get HDMI 2.1 approval on Linux. Nvidia somewhat has it with their proprietary drivers, but not nouveau.
They’re not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.
The movie studios. As the person above said, the HDMI consortium (owned by movie studios) is focused on protecting their members IP rights from pirates. HDMI has built in DRM, that could be removed from an open source driver.
so what you’re saying is we need to make hdmi driver patches to allow direct file saving from video streams?
Well, one of the master keys leaked about 15 years back. A researcher posted a paper back in 2003 or so that outlined a method of finding a master key that was likely used by the people who made the release. It was a fun time to be on the internet, the people came together and said, yeah fuck those corpos and everyone reposted the key to every form of social media possible. I knew someone with the key tattooed on their arm (as part of their piracy themed artwork, I used to have pictures)
Now, that particular master key was patched out with a compatibility breaking upgrade, specifically 2.1 of the standard, which was proven to be broken in 2012, but there was less coming together to share it the second time, or the third for 2.2 of the standard.
But yes, if you wanted to code your own, you easily could. Just don’t share it or the sue happy corpos will come knocking.
Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don’t appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.
The HDMI founders were Hitachi, Matsushita (now Panasonic), Maxell, Philips, Silicon Image (now Lattice Semiconductor), Sony, Thomson (now Vantiva), and Toshiba.[3] Intel contributed the HDCP copy protection system.[4] The new format won the support of motion picture studios Fox, Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney, along with content distributors DirecTV, EchoStar (Dish Network) and CableLabs.[2]
While Sony is a technology company, they’re also a very sue happy IP holder through Sony pictures and Playstation.
Sony continues to be a major player on the HDMI forum.
I haveb’t looked into this particular group, but usually it’s patents. Someone owns a patent for the tech required to implement the standard, and they “license” it out to anyone who wants to implement that standard. Obviously, they won’t agree to terms that hurt their ability to collect rent on their patent. Qualcomm is famously guilty of this in the modem space.
Does that seem stupid, to adopt an industry standard that requires patented technology to implement? That’s because it is, and were we a sane society we would invalidate any patents that become an industry standard, but we’re a bunch of idiots with a billionaire cuck fetish.
It’s wild how much we flock around such shitty standards all the time, generation after generation.
We don’t flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.
One of the biggest problems is that shitty standards use the money they get from licensing the standard to push the standard. Good open standards often don’t have a marketing budget to play with. On top of that, shitty standards can make unrealistic promises to gain an advantage. Like HDMI does with DRM. “If every device uses this standard, piracy will be a thing of the past!”
Yes, that is what I meant, the ‘we’ used like an alien might observe us.
Theoretically we could stop buying TVs, but practically we are forced into it by supply.
And yes, licencing a standard beyond dev should be just illegal, it hurts (almost) everyone.
We don’t flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.
Nothing is forced on anyone. If people refused to buy them they would be forced to add other ports.
However as someone who considers themselves fairly techy and doesn’t comply with such shitfuckery, I only learned about this last week.
Moving forward I just won’t be buying any TVs at all.
This ethical position is such crap in the modern era and if you take it you simply aren’t going to be contributing to this conversation much longer. Unless you go full stallman and get a specific laptop from 15 years ago with very specific hardware that you can flash and install very specific software onto it you have to make peace with the fact that as a modern consumer the landscape has fucked you.
Your choices are to moderate how fucked yoh get in terms of anticonsumer bullshit because the market is stacked against you and the illusion of choice is always there. HDMI is a great example, smartphone platforms outside of android and ios is another. Are their options outside of these walled gardens? Technically but they’re generally much worse and often cost more than a comparable model.
It’s just you can refuse to buy an iphone, you can refuse to buy an android, but you can’t really refuse to buy a smartphone in the modern era. You can refuse to buy a tv but you can’t really refuse to buy a display of some kind. You might think you beat the system if you just get a laptop or computer monitor I guess but not really, monitors increasingly don’t have DP and frankly the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway. Consumers are idiots who will continually vote to fuck themselves. We need regulatory oversight.
the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway
Voting with your wallet is literally the only way things will ever improve.
See how well that has worked over the past 40 years? I mean don’t buy shit you don’t support obviously but don’t expect a personal boycott or even advocating heavily for others to the same to have any kind of impact whatsoever.
It’s because the average consumer is dumb but this isn’t an indictment of the average consumer, necessarily. The average consumer doesn’t want to have to do research on every fucking thing they buy to find out the nefarious bullshit about it. Oh the tv doesn’t support open connection standards, oh my phone is a walled garden built for data collection, oh this smart lightbulb is a privacy nightmare with bullshit tos and also has security issues, etc. They just want to go on amazon or to home depot or whatever and buy shit that looks like it will do what they need for a price point they can afford.
That’s where regulatory oversight comes in: given the above and a consistent lack of consumer ability to enforce standards we need political oversight to pick up the slack. This is a unified arm where a consumer frustration can turn into action much more quickly, even if sales continue because of market fuckery (eg tvs still selling because you can only buy hdmi TVs). But unfortunately we live in a country where the tech industry has performed a near and total regulatory capture and has no fear that regulatory oversight will ever occur, and they’re probably right, at least for now.
So you’re wrong that it’s the only way, and I would argue it’s the most ineffective and inefficient way. It just feels like it’s the only way because of our failed state political situation where even a regulatory concern that should be a slam dunk like right to repair often either fails or only passes in a greatly neutered state because the local politicians thought Microsoft and Apple made some great points about preventing local jobs so that tech billionaires could continue to make even more money
See how well that has worked over the past 40 years?
…extremely well? Can you provide an example of the contrary?
don’t expect a personal boycott or even advocating heavily for others to the same to have any kind of impact whatsoever.
…of course a single person boycotting a product does nothing. People educating themselves about the products they buy and making conscious decisions to buy consumer-friendly products when buying shit (especially expensive shit) does.
They just want to go on amazon or to home depot or whatever and buy shit that looks like it will do what they need for a price point they can afford.
Plenty of people know and just don’t care. I know because I have these types of conversations all the time.
That’s where regulatory oversight comes in
See how well that has worked over the past 2000 years?
Quit posting ancap propaganda.
The way this sort of thing would actually improve is by government regulation.
Quit posting corporate propaganda. The government can regulate all they want. Businesses are malicious and just exploit loopholes everywhere and pay off the politicians. Taking away their motivation is not something they can get around.
“Vote with your wallet” is not ancap propaganda. “Abolish all money” is.
The only way? Literally?
Yes, that’s what I said.
This explains so much why actual voting numbers are so poor in the US…
…wat
As end consumers we individually have no power to affect the types of products that are offered. What am I supposed to do? Find me a TV that supports DisplayPort
we individually have no power
Individually, no. Collectively? Yes.
What am I supposed to do?
Don’t buy a TV? They are increasingly shitty products anyway.
That’s great for you, but try to convince one other person who’s not already in your headspace they should not buy any more TVs. That’s almost an impossible ask. Like telling someone not to get an Android or iPhone because of the data collection. Geeks like us can put up with these inconveniences but we’re a very small minority.
People are still going to get the product unless there’s a truly viable alternative available. Until we see a new standard whose goal is to specifically target replacing HDMI in this context, there’s not really any way to suggest people “vote with their wallet” on something as common as HDMI.
I’m not sure what that has to do with what I said. This is about corporations asking consumers to bend over and get fucked, and consumers as a whole repeatedly lining up to take it.
They’re not lining up to take it though. It’s all they’re given. When HDMI was new, most people skipped component cables entirely and went straight from 480i analog to 720p digital overnight and the only way to do that at the time was HDMI. Years and years later, we still only have HDMI and DP as the two standards and they’re not putting the alternative on TVs.
The consumer does have the responsibility to make the choice, but only when those choices are actually presented to them. If there were DP TVs as available options, I’d agree with your point, but I’m not about to ask my friends to boycott HDMI TVs anytime soon because I know all it will do is inconvenience them and it won’t make a lick of difference in the market.
They’re not lining up to take it though
They are though.
It’s all they’re given
Then they can choose not to buy anything, or to buy a computer monitor.
it won’t make a lick of difference in the market.
This is the defeatist mentality that keeps them so successful.
Now if you could just convince the rest of the country to not have a TV in every room of their houses.
You wouldn’t have to. Even a small fraction would create a market vacuum for a competitor.
Nobody is gonna watch a vacuum buddy not even a fancy dyson.
Hehe
BFGs with display port do exist as a viable replacement for a TV, but they’re expensive and kinda niche.
It already comes with DP 1.4. enough for me
DisplayPort for the win
Sincerely! As someone who dislikes DisplayPort, moves like that makes me want to use it over HDMI.
Hmm, that’s a new one for me. Why the dislike for DisplayPort?
“We need to develop a one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.”
At least one person got the joke. 😁
It exists. It’s Display Port.
The use case of “make a shit ton of money licensing a proprietary standard” is kind of mutually exclusive with other use cases. It would be hard to cover.
At the time, there were too many standards. But looking back from today, we see that standardization does eventually occur, it just takes time.
There’s a huge rabbit hole with HDMI certification…
Like, display port is better in everyway, but people make a shit ton of money off putting “HDMI certified” on products, so that’s still the default.
Well Valve should sell an optional DisplayPort adapter then, right?
The Steam Machine is supposed to be plug and play, and not getting VRR on your TV is a huge compromise.
Most people who want plug and play probably don’t know what VRR is.
Heck I don’t fully remember it and I actually learned why it’s nice and would want it.
It should automatically be enabled if it’s supported, and just give you a straight up better experience. At lower frame rates and budget hardware, the difference is especially dramatic.
I’m not sure why people are so upset.
It’s a little annoying sure, but don’t these work?It has displayport already, the hdmi concerns are regarding its utility with a television.
Do they make DP support HDMI 2.1/2.2?
That one I linked does HDMI 2.1
I haven’t seen any that claim 2.2There are also cables with DisplayPort on one end and HDMI on the other. No seperate adapter
I just don’t trust the claims. Looks like mixed reviews on 2.1 features working.
I wonder what one should actually expect to work in a passive cable/adapter.
Length matters. Off the top of my head I think the spec is for 16’ max. If you’re dasy changing a pair of 10’+ cables on an adapter like that, you might run into problems.
Length matters on most cables, USB, FireWire, HDMI, DisplayPort, etc. The question here is if all of the features translate properly. Not all passive adapters are equally capable, and this is true for a few standards/cable types.
A lot of my friends have said they prefer girth, fwiw.
Jokes aside, that’s a good point. HDMI/DisplayPort, like USB, pass digital signals over many small cables in a bundle. With how much data uncompressed high res images consist of, I doubt there’s a lot of redundancy or parity the way there may be for Cat6 cable using TCP. At a certain point, without a powered repeater cable, the image will probably not work (or not reliably). Idk if that would appear as “no signal” or dropped frames, though.
Passive adapters don’t have much power to work with for signal processing… Idk how different the image signals themselves are between HDMI and DisplayPort, but I know from working with EDIDs that there’s many optional modes and features for both, like multiple audio/videos streams (3d video, surround sound, hdmi arc), different colorspaces, HDR and VRR. I’d be surprised if any passive HDMI-to-DP adapter supports more than the most common modes and features.
Both HDMI and display port are at their core, data cables. As long as the noise is low enough to maintain bandwidth, it’ll be fine. The cables them selves don’t have any intelligence to determine one feature over another.
That makes this situation/discussion really strange then.
Because if an adapter from DP to HDMI fixed this driver issue, Valve would know and would just include an adapter in the box. Right? There wouldn’t be these statements from Valve without mentioning the obvious solution?
I’m not sure we are on the same page about what the core issue is with suggesting an adapter will address concerns over HDMI 2.1 and 2.2 features on Linux/Steam Machines.
