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)
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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 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.
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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.
And you have to keep buying the new version because certification will be based on the latest standard. We have the same thing with ISO and ASME among others in our sector.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
I wonder if the license dictates that you must use a specific language, or if they could ship that proprietary component in Javascript. My understanding is that well-written JS with a JIT runtime can be very close to native performance. Not only would that make fun of the forum's requirements, it would also provide transparency about what the proprietary module does on your system exactly
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".
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.)
That would be easier if both GPU and display manufacturers weren't eschewing newer DisplayPort versions for older versions with DSC (which is not lossless despite its subjective claims of being "visually lossless"), while building in newer HDMI versions with greater performance.
To be fair, the DisplayPort 2.0/2.1 standardisation process was riddled with delays and they ended up landing years after HDMI 2.1 did. It stands to reason that hardware manufacturers picked up the earlier spec first.
what resolution is it that you can drive with "newer HDMI versions" but you cannot drive with DisplayPort 1.4 w/o DSC? The bandwidth difference is not really that much in practice, and "newer HDMI versions" also rely on DSC, or worse, chroma subsampling (objectively and subjectively worse).
I mean, one has been able to drive 5K, 4K@120Hz, etc. for almost over a decade with DP1.4, for the same res you need literally the latest version of HDMI (the "non" TDMS one). It's no wonder that display screens _have_ to use the latest version of HDMI, because otherwise they cannot be driven from a single HDMI port at all.
Having monitors that supported its native resolution through DP but not HDMI used to be a thing until very recently.
There are a lot of PC boards where the iGPU only has an HDMI 2.1 output, or with a DP1.4. But DP1.4 doesn't support some of the resolution/refresh combinations that HDMI 2.1 does. Normally this doesn't matter, but it could if you have, for example, the Samsung 57 inch dual 4K ultrawide.
"Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.
the problem only affect a subset of HDMI 2.1 features, not HDMI 2.0
but the steam machine isn't really super powerful (fast enough for a lot of games, faster then what a lot of steam customers have, sure. But still no that fast.)
So most of the HDMI 2.1 features it can't use aren't that relevant. Like sure you don't get >60fps@4K but you already need a good amount of FSR to get to 60fps@4k.
>
"Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.
I would recommend Valve to create an official list of consumer displays that ("certified by Valve") do have proper support for the most recent version of Display Port with support for all features relevant to gaming.
This way gamers know which display to buy next, and display vendors get free advertising for their efforts that is circulated to an audience that is very willing to buy a display in the near future.
Aren't DP-HDMI adapters good enough for the majority of consumers? On my ancient (2017) PC with integrated graphics I can't tell a difference between the DP out vs the HDMI out.
I frequently see comments that say the TV companies are the ones getting the royalties, so I looked it up.
According to Gemini, the royalties go to the _original_ HDMI founders. That includes Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and Toshiba. It does not include Samsung, or LG.
Please don't post random LLM slop on HN, there's more than enough of it on the internet as is. The value of HN is the human discussion. Everyone here is capable of using an LLM if they so desire.
Readit News
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/
(I'm not a lawyer, please correct me if I'm wrong)
Straight to jail!
Pirating the entire internet to train your AI?
That's fair use.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
Assuming the diatributor doesn't claim the software or device is hdmi licensed, what laws would they be breaking?
i think they are configured to auto-accept by default but that's been fine so far hasn't it
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.
Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
It's sad what people put up with now.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?
https://www.3gpp.org/
What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?
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.
Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPort is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.
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)
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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.
For a simple example, a TV usually assumes the viewer isn't sitting just inches away from it...
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.
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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.
https://www.facebook.com/HDMIForum/
https://twitter.com/HDMIForum/
https://www.instagram.com/hdmiforum/
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8553802
(I was quite a bit less surprised that there was no real content in them)
(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.)
[1] https://www.instagram.com/bureauofprisons/
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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.
1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
Anyone can then implement opensource driver based on that and distribute it freely, since NDA won't apply to them.
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.
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.
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".
You can make up some difference with DSC, but I think that requires the display to support it: dongles won't decode it.
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 mean, one has been able to drive 5K, 4K@120Hz, etc. for almost over a decade with DP1.4, for the same res you need literally the latest version of HDMI (the "non" TDMS one). It's no wonder that display screens _have_ to use the latest version of HDMI, because otherwise they cannot be driven from a single HDMI port at all.
Having monitors that supported its native resolution through DP but not HDMI used to be a thing until very recently.
but the steam machine isn't really super powerful (fast enough for a lot of games, faster then what a lot of steam customers have, sure. But still no that fast.)
So most of the HDMI 2.1 features it can't use aren't that relevant. Like sure you don't get >60fps@4K but you already need a good amount of FSR to get to 60fps@4k.
I would recommend Valve to create an official list of consumer displays that ("certified by Valve") do have proper support for the most recent version of Display Port with support for all features relevant to gaming.
This way gamers know which display to buy next, and display vendors get free advertising for their efforts that is circulated to an audience that is very willing to buy a display in the near future.
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According to Gemini, the royalties go to the _original_ HDMI founders. That includes Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and Toshiba. It does not include Samsung, or LG.