- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve’s Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations.
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Are people just forgetting it has a displayport also? Just ignore HDMI, they got greedy, onto the rubbish pile they go.
The people who block HDMI for Linux are also the people who make TVs and other media stuff. So you may not be able to use displayport or hdmi just because some rich people decided so to make more profit.
This is what I said the other day about this issue. Good luck finding a decent tv with display port! Those fuckers are rare and expensive!
Ok but I need a pretty expensive active adaptor for my tv?
no. I have a DP to HDMI cable that cost me like $20. it does great.
Two considerations: Displayport doesn’t support audio, and there is no connector on the planet more frustrating and unreliable than DisplayPort. It’s like a joke how sensitive it is to the lightest bump. HDMI just works.
DisplayPort absolutely does support audio
DisplayPort supports a wide range of audio formats, including multi-channel audio like 7.1 surround sound, ensuring compatibility with various multimedia applications and delivering a robust audio experience directly aligned with the video output.
https://www.anker.com/blogs/hubs-and-docks/do-display-ports-support-audio
You seem knowledgeable, Mr. Vandelay. Perhaps you deal with imports and exports… if so on the topic of audio on DisplayPort, are you aware of any Receivers that will split the signal to send audio to speakers and video to your projector or monitor (TV but there are few)?
Serious question about the receiver if you do know of any - it’s come up in the last week while seeing the Valve HDMI news on Lemmy. I found some projectors that have DP, but no receivers and hoping someone here can!
should be able to with hdmi arc, not sure 100% tho but it seems like you could tell the projector where to send the audio, i know you can with tvs and hdmi arc. worst case scenario you do dp in to the projector and hope valve has stereo or optical out to go into reciever
I know that there are some complicated configurations that you could use to get the audio feed from display port to your receiver, like running it through a splitter that will strip out the audio and send it to your receiver separately. I’m pretty sure there are no mainstream AV receivers that will do what you want because the market is split between home theatre and PC, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and manufacturers need to be convinced there’s a market for it.
In that situation, I would connect the output device, in this case a PC, directly to the TV/monitor with DP, and run optical audio from either the TV or the output device to receiver.
You lose some of the integrated control that HDMI-CEC gives you, so get a good universal remote that can adapt to this set up and get one-button source switching back.
My cat literally loves hiding behind my display port connected monitor, bumps into it all the time, it has never disconnected or stopped working. Your cable might suck.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but displayport absolutely supports audio. In most of the same formats that HDMI does as well.
Also, I’ve only ever had issues with HDMI plugs. All the displayport plugs I’ve used had positive locks on them and have been the most reliable plugs I’ve ever had to use aside from BNC connections.
You could perhaps have instead gone with “you don’t find displayport on cheap consumer displays,” because that’s an accurate statement. That’s a huge part of why this is a big deal.
Didn’t know the HDMI cartel could afford bots / useful idiots
They must have found one in the bargain bin.
HDMI, what’s that ?
sent from my DisplayPort monitor
HDMI Forum has fewer than 80 members and membership fee is 15,000 USD/year. Valve could spin up 80 companies, have them join the forum for a low low price of 1.2M USD and outvote remaining members to open source the entire spec.
Does it have to be companies? Could individual people just have 15k, and join? We just need 81 new members.
This is hilariously plausible. Someone SCUBA down to Gabe and give him the idea.
rofl, I hate billionaires but this would be peak trolling
Hate the player, don’t hate the game
I fucking hate this phrase. You have the choice to not participate and be a normal human instead of a sociopath.
Hate the players because they perpetuate the game.
No players, no game
deleted by creator
Not all software available on Linux is open source. NVIDIA drivers for example. Hell, most of the games on Steam are closed source.
So, is it just a matter of principle on Valve and AMD’s part that they only want to ship with fully open source drivers?
I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to understand why you can’t just make the HDMI 2.1 part of the driver code closed source and the rest of the graphics drivers open?
Modern specs are complicated. I vaguely remember something about a cryptographic key the driver needs to be signed with to successfully complete the handshake to enable all display options between the computer and display.
Not entirely unwarranted either, an unexpected amount of voltage on an unexpected pin because the driver / hardware is misconfigured damaging your TV would suck. (Still sounds like the Forum is being a dick about it though.)
Are your electric plugs closed source lmaoi
unless you’re a NES. which then a voltage spike gets the DRM permanantly out of the way forever.
I recently watched a video about HDMI. I didn’t hate HDMI but now I kinda do.
Unfortunately most standards bodies are pretty much this stupid though. Blu-ray, DVD, USB, hell even codecs like H265 and MP3 have governing bodies that are mostly enterprises enforcing their collective power on standards. That’s good in ways because it means they all have to decide on a standard that’ll work wihh to pretty much anything, but bad because they can also enforce bullying like HDCP onto consumers.
That sucks
Console manufacturers all just need to switch to displayport to encourage tv manufacturers to do the same. No one’s going to not buy a ps6 or steam machine because they have to use a little dp-hdmi adapter, but they might be a little more likely to choose a tv that doesn’t need an adapter over one that does
Sony would probably create a proprietary standard before they’d switch to displayport.
What about shipping an adaptor? DP to HDMI for the transition?
Can dp even translate to HDMI with a “dumb” adapter?
Yes.
I have a secondary monitor running on a unpowered, dumb (and cheap), DP to HDMI driver right now
DP can do HDMI natively.
HDMI needs an active adapter to support DP.
Yes, DP converts to HDMI natively. But because HDMI has so much proprietary BS built in, going from HDMI to DP requires an active adapter which strips out the proprietary BS.
yes, i have a dp to hdmi 2.1 cable that cost like 35€. it works fine except each time i get up from my chair the screen flashes white. and no VRR.
it works fine except each time i get up from my chair the screen flashes white
Wha… how? What?
ESD. the air is extremely dry here
Whoa
There are a lot of passive adapters out there that seem like black magic at first.
Obviously has drawbacks, but you can also do displayport/hdmi to VGA passively.
That is not passive, they have to “translate”.
Oh, you may have got me.
By passive, I was trying to say that no external power/additional connection/etc is required. But, the port is technically powered and that is enough to make it not passive.
I have a 25ft HDMI cable that works fine for everything except sometimes when I open a new tab in Firefox, the screen temporarily goes blank/no-signal for a couple seconds. Also sometimes when the dryer turns on.
my friend has had this issue for years, when he turns on a fan his monitor turns off for a second
Can’t be a passive adapter or else that would mean DisplayPort and HDMI have to protocol compatible. If they were then we wouldn’t have this issue.
Nope. DisplayPort can adapt to HDMI or DVI passively. It won’t support the proprietary bullshit like HDCP, but it will be able to display video just fine. Pin 13 on DP is specifically used to detect adapters, so the output device can automatically change to using an HDMI protocol if it detects an HDMI adapter. This technically requires a dual-mode DP port to automatically adapt, but the vast majority of DP connectors produced in the past several years are dual-mode.
But going the other direction (HDMI to DP) requires an active adapter, to strip out all of the proprietary HDMI-only bullshit.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dp+to+hdmi
Here’s an already filled in Google search for you.
Oh wow thanks! Alright everyone. We can all get off lemmy now. Turns out we can just look everything up online. No need to waste time talking to each other. Ugh!
Or you can simply look up the answer to a super basic question in the same amount of time it takes to ask it in a forum so that you’re contributing to the conversation, rather than lazily putting it on other people to answer.
You can’t look up everything online, but you can look up basic information fundamental to the conversation you’re in.
Or choosing to ask a question means they actually want to hear what other people have to say and not whatever AI slop the major search engines have become
where’s the Google in this search?
Where it belongs
(Out of the picture)
The duck ate it.
Good point!
I agree with the sentiment but we’re dealing with a chicken and egg problem. If no TVs have DisplayPort, who would buy a console that can’t be used with their TV?
TVs are starting to come with DisplayPort already in the form of USB-C alt mode.
Not really. Both could start shipping both connectors, except if I’m unaware of some licensing issue over that?
If I’m a TV manufacturer, I have less incentive to have both connector types because it increases cost and complexity while only appealing to a very small subset of users. It will take leadership at those companies to take a bit of a leap of faith that the effort is valuable as a long term plan because it will take other manufacturers to make the ecosystem. Couple that with the fact that leadership at companies tend to not be enthusiasts or technically inclined and it makes it difficult, but not impossible. I really hope we can move electronics towards DisplayPort just so it’s an open standard instead of the HDMI for-profit model.
Ah, the Apple strategy of forcing a standard.
EDIT: By that I mean when Apple started putting USB (1.0) on their Macs back in the day to encourage more USB accessories. Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?) or lightning BS.
You’re thinking of firewire, and that was not proprietary. Sony came up with that. I had a mini disc player with a firewire port. And thunderbolt, which is what they use now, is an evolution on firewire made by Apple, Sony, and Intel.
Both firewire and thunderbolt are superior to USB.
The first time I ever used a firewire port, I thought it was black magic compared to usb. It was INSANELY faster and super consistent speed. It was the same level of wow as the first time I used an SSD vs HDD.
Compared to the top speed of USB 2.0, firewire 400 was actually faster in that regard (due to a consistent transfer rate rather than a variable one), and I’ll explain where the true performance came in to play, and how thunderbolt also has this amazing feature:
When usb connections begin to data transfer, they started at 0 Kb and slowly speed up to the maximum transfer rate. Then it slows down before completion. FireWire (and is successor, Thunderbolt) maintain a consistent data transfer speed. It begins at that transfer rate, and ends at that transfer rate. This is especially good if you’re moving around a large amount of small files.
Also, firewire 400 already beat out USB 2.0’s 382 Mb/s transfer rate. Firework 800 more than doubled it, and thunderbolt 1 started at 1.5 GB a second. We’re at thunderbolt 5 now, and I stopped keeping track of the data rates because they were so blazingly fast.
One drawback, however, is that firewire cables, and subsequently thunderbolt cables, are both extremely expensive and not very durable. They contain a lot more twisted copper wires, and tend to wear out faster. USB cables are nearly indestructible.
Additionally, firewire (and thunderbolt) are also a networking protocol. You can create an ad-hoc LAN just with firewire or thunderbolt cable cables. This is natively built into macOS, but, on Linux, it requires some sorcery to make it work. With a Mac, and an emergency, you can boot your Mac with a damaged hard to drive remote remotely from another functional Mac just by using a thunderbolt cable (or a firewire cable). It’s a neat trick, and has saved my ass more times than I can count.
One final awesome feature of thunderbolt 2+ is that a natively carries DisplayPort signals since switching to the USB 3 plug standard.
I was thinking of the 30 Pin Dock Connector, which was proprietary, but it looks like it used both FireWire and USB protocols.
Apple was known for helping propagate FireWire too.
Leave it to me to only consider the male end of the connector 😜
Got a Firewire port on my PS2. The only thing I’ve ever owned with Firewire and I never even used it.
I have an old iMac that I use as a Plex server, and it has a firewire 800 port and a thunderbolt 1 port, both of which I use for a couple of very old external drive enclosures. Sure as hell beats USB 2.0.
I always wanted a way to use that jack, still have no clue what it was for
No, youngin’ they’re talking about USB. The original iMac was USB-only specifically to force the adoption of USB keyboards and mice.
Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?)
This is what I was responding to. Also, they only sold that iMac for about a year, after which point iMacs came with FireWire ports.
And I’m in my 40s. I’m not a “youngin’”.
As long as the manufacturers are competing against each other, that’s never going to happen.
The “gamer” consumer demographic has some of the most whiny, entitled vocal minorities. They’re going to endlessly complain about the next generation of console needing a special cable/dongle to connect to their TV, one of the manufacturers are going to fold, and then the other one is going to walk back the lack of HDMI because they don’t want to lose sales to their competitor.
I mean we don’t use coax/channel 3 any longer. Just do it.
That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”
Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.
Because of that lack of perceptible benefit to them, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t going to be good. Even if it’s an objectively better standard from a technical perspective, it will just come across to consumers as an unnecessary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.
They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.
The only way console manufacturers are going to stay united in kicking HDMI to the curb is if the organization behind HDMI pulls a Unity move and starts charging royalties to the manufacturers for every time a consumer plugs the console into a TV.
We bitched about usbc but I love the standard connector
It bothers me. There are too many things that are either not standards-complient or support different parts of the USB feature set that compatibility is a wildcard.
I carry a large backup battery when I travel for work. It can keep my laptop going under load all day, allowing me to not care at all about proximity to outlets when working. It also allows me to painlessly recharge phones by just handing it to someone.
Last week, I was running something from someone else’s laptop (enterprise HP, like mine, but different model). It got low, so I pulled out my battery. Plug it in… No power. I could see the voltage fluctuations of it negotiating, but nothing after that.
Well how do YOU connect your NES up to your TV then???
https://hdmiforum.org/members/
AMD is part of the forum but can’t get them to accept their own open source driver. I guess we can’t complain or shame all of them in one. I wonder who voted reject vs accept.
Sad.
Fewer than 80 members. 15k/year membership fee and very lax joining requirements. $1.2M gets you majority allowing you do to whatever even with 100% of current members opposing :P
Then AMD needs to apply more leverage or start an awareness campaign with as much shit PR for every business supporting them.
How hilarious would it be if the AMD board member was the one who veto’d the driver 😅
AMD has had the code ready to include in their open source driver for a while and has been trying to get HDMI Forum to let them release it for a long time https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Wild to see DisplayLink among the companies here.
Knowbe your enemy, they say.But jokes aside, I believe DisplayLink’s focus is primarily on the client<->docking station part, with docking station<->monitor usually still being HDMI/DP (same with direct client<->monitor links). So they still have to interface with it some way or another.
Evil, greedy little bastards…
They are clearly in the pockets of Microsoft.
We need more DisplayPort in the world - and better support for multi-monitor setups under Linux.
What are you missing in multi-monitor setups under Linux?
Every time I plug a second monitor into my Linux PC (Mint), both screens start blinking on and off. Sometimes Win+P works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve asked in the Discord, I’ve tried arandr. Nothing works.
Multimontitor display issues are why I switched from mint to a distro that uses Wayland
Do you have adaptive sync on? If you do try turning it off for both monitors. That worked for me but your milage may vary.
Mint isn’t wayland yet and X11 does not support adaptive sync if multiple monitors are connected
I don’t even know what that is, frankly.
What kind of GPU are you using?
Neofetch says that it’s seeing an AMD ATI Radeon HD 8730M and an Intel Haswell-ULT, which is probably the chipset connected to the i7-4600U, and I’m assuming what 99% of the graphics are being generated on.
Odd, I have three screens active on my Mint desktop right now. I’ll have to try this on my Mint laptop and see what happens.
3 monitors here and working fine on Elementary OS, Super+P works as well. Are you on Wayland or X11?
Whatever Cinnamon runs on natively. I have no idea beyond that.
Last I heard Cinnamon does not have stable Wayland support yet. One of the reasons Wayland was made is because multi-screen support on the old X11 is an ugly hack. Unlike wayland, it doesn’t play well with screens of different resolutions, refresh rates, adaptive sync compatibility or HDR.
Oh, then it’s probably that issue.
Then it would be best to check the version of your distro and session, then go to their github issue list and search for it, if there isn’t one provide a issue for them to look at. I also recommend verifying if it’s not a hardware issue or cable fault.
But why does the HDMI fourm not want a open source 2.1-compliant implementation? Is it DRM related? I feel like it’s DRM related.
Its fully DRM related.
My guess is if it’s open source it’s more easily cracked.
But why does the HDMI forum not want a open source 2.1-compliant implementation?
To my knowledge they’ve never officially said but you can be sure that it has to do with Content Protection and that means DRM. An Open Source HDMI 2.1+ driver would make pirating much simpler, probably trivial and they don’t want that.
It’s possible anyway of course but there are a couple of hardware hoops to jump through and that’s enough to keep most people from doing it.
Likely moreso that they’re facing pressure from other competitors in the industry that see Steam and open source in general as a threat to their business model. The HDMI forum is made up of industry leaders, and naturally Microsoft and Sony are there.
They’ve been refusing open HDMI 2.1 since 2017. I don’t think that being afraid of Linux becoming the dominant gaming platform plays a role here; it’s more likely that they’re afraid people might find new ways to get at protected content.
Ive never had using HDMI prevent me from enjoying pirated media, so Ive always been confused about what sort of drm a TV is looking for.
It’s more of a barrier for people who are pirating media, not the ones consuming that pirated media.
They charge a fee for access to the spec and maintain who can claim their products are HDMI compliant and require compliance testing on those products.
An open source implementation would make that spec public and strip a lot of control they hold.
Because that would open source certain implementations they want to hold captive.
It also enforces closed source drivers which can be shipped with spyware/crapware, further extending profits for companies… companies that happen to make up the HDMI Forum.
Part of being open source is subsequent licensing. This would allow any others to piggyback and avoid the fee.
Maybe a dumb question… if I used a DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 adapter, would I get 4K at 120Hz on the Steam Machine and my LG CX tv?
Depends on the adapter and source. You may find issues when playing HDPC protected content of you buy a low quality adapter.
DisplayPort to HDMI doesn’t need an adapter since DP has an alt signal mode with HDMI support.
Although I’m not sure 2.1 signalling is available yet or not.
DP++ HDMI support tells the GPU to output HDMI. If the GPU can’t output HDMI 2.1 over an HDMI port, it can’t output it over a DisplayPort (as a general rule; you could theoretically wire the DP for a higher standard, but why would you?)
Yeah, just it doesn’t support VRR. If you read the article, you’d know
If the article didn’t require accepting cookies to read it I would :D (just being snarky)
Nah, I don’t blame you. The list of crap that I had to allow under “required” to read the article was preposterous.
Not that this cube would run any modern game at 4k and more than 60 fps.
4k 120hz on the steam cube?? Sounds like a job for Lossless Scaling 4x Frame Gen! /s
VRR is very useful at these midrange specs though. Avoiding tearing and lurching down to 30fps is honestly the best upgrade I’ve made for my PC in years.
Nobody said you need to play a modern game. Just play an older or indie game and enjoy gloriousness.
I don’t know this area well. But I have a strong preference for all port shapes to be the same where possible. Can USB-C shaped heads do the same thing as DisplayPort? If not now, is it possible to make it in the future.
Thunderbolt is exactly that.
Thunderbolt 2 and Mini Displayport used to have the same connector. Since Thunderbolt 3, it now uses the USB C connector.
Thunderbolt 5 supports Displayport 2.1. I wish more devices used Thunderbolt compatible USB C ports. Or GPUs came with a Thunderbolt port on them. They’re pretty awesome, it’s like better USB C.
It seems like only laptops really use them to allow docking through a single cable
You don’t need Thunderbolt for Displayport alt mode. It’s a separate spec that can also be implemented independently. I have a dock that’s not Thunderbolt but supports DP alt mode.
But Thunderbolt has some additional stuff too
Display Port over USB C is a thing now. It’s how laptop docks work these days. In one cable you have power, video, and USB.
Unfortunately this has an even more serious problem:
How do you know which cable supports which modes of delivery?
Turns out you have a usb c cable that doesn’t actually support power delivery or anything
Now what do you do?
Buy a supported cable? That’s a cable issue not a standards or forums issue
USB c cables right now are often counterfeit or inferior to the listed specs
You need to test them yourself to know their power delivery and features
With a separate port that is a significantly reduced issue
It’s a travesty! I just went through this barbed wire circus! Swore to all my friends that Anker branded cables are “the way”. Sank a good amount of my money into that brand. Only to find that while yes, they excel in power delivery, many times when it comes to Data Transfer Rates, these new Anker cables are maxing out at 480Mbps. That’s USB ver. 2.0 speed. In a 2025 USB-C form factor. Other brands are pushing 40Gbps and Anker is just like the brandname (in Dutch): an anchor. I’m so peeved at the fact these manufacturers don’t do like the IEEE did regarding Ethernet cables: printed every X distance is the standard, right on the jacketing. You can’t tell me these USB cable manufacturers can’t follow suit. It’s USB! Need we all buy USB-IF compliant consumables? Is this really where we are this late into USB ver 3.X now going into USB ver. 4 ?!
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot - I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!.. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
But again that’s not related to a committee stopping the implementation of a standard. It’s a scale of production issue, a labelling issue, and a consumer protection issue.
And I like having one port to just dock my machine in for power and display. I do understand how a separate port can help but I don’t see why we can’t have USB C working to its designed spec apart from the reasons I listed above.
This is why many of the expensive Dock options from HP / Dell / Lenovo, etc come with a non-detachable USB-C cable. You can’t have the “wrong” cable because the one you need isn’t removable.
Why though? It’s immediately clear where a VGA or hdmi cable works, but a USB-C could support or not support anything.
So could an hdmi cable, there a lots of different hdmi specs as there are usb c specs. The problem is the lack of standardized labeling not the cables shapes. USB-C for everything would personally be my preference
That is where port markings come into play…
You also need cable markings, as both the cable and the port decide what specs to implement, and if they’re standard compliant or not.
Plus there are active/inactive cables for thunderbolt (and I think usb4) which massively affect performance.
USB c is better than the shitty port designs of USB before it, but it’s a huge mess.
USB-C alt mode is DisplayPort with a USB-C connector.
