Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.
Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues.
Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues.
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the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1.
Assholes.
They want to make money
And they're allowed to. But this is not that.
...the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.
I can think of a money reason to block open source implementations...
Sure, so does organized crime. What's your point?
Hey now, organized crime usually has an element of giving back to the community, it's much more ethical than this!
The HDMI Forum blocks open source implementations of their spec. They want to keep it closed source so they can charge whatever they want to use their standards.
Big content creators (Disney, Netflix, etc) want TV manufacturers to keep using HDMI because the standard includes a DRM protocol.
And here are those companies making that decision
You only need to get down the list to broadcom before it becomes obvious this isn't going to change.
so pretty much all important companies ☹️
I'm glad more people are hearing how it's this group of standards assholes who are causing it.
Laughs in displayport
I really wish displayport on TVs would take off.
I really wish I could buy big ass dumb monitor at the cost of a similar size smart tv.
Hollywood hates that idea.
That's the idea
I don't know why the Steam Machine doesn't have DisplayPort 2.0 (release June 2019)...
Probably because it's designed to be attached to TVs, which use hdmi.
It has DP 1.4 though.
Ouch, tought it didn't have DP at all. My bad
How, though? I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the law, but I know interoperability is one of the major sources of exceptions to copyright protection, and the whole Google vs Oracle saga would imply there's nothing illegal about making your own implementation of a standard without permission.
AMD is a member of the HDMI consortium and is probably bound by private agreements to not make open source drivers without permission from the consortium. They did try to get them to budge but they didn't.
Copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret laws are all entirely different and have almost nothing to do with each other (don't be fooled by the property-rights-hating shysters who try to gaslight you into lumping them all as "intellectual property[sic]").
Trademarks and patents don't have the same kinds of interoperability exceptions that copyright does, and you can't claim to "support HDMI™" without licensing rights to those in addition to whatever copyrighted code you might need for the software side of the implementation.
So what stops them from supporting HDMI™ 2.1 but just not call it that? As long as they create the code in a clean room scenario I don't see how they could be liable for damages? Although I assume it has something to with DRM.. And then you get into the weeds of the terrible cyber security laws...
