I do not really have a body for this. I was not aware that this is a thing and still feel like this is bs, but maybe there is an actual explanation for HDMI Forum’s decision that I am missing.
I really hope we’ll see TVs with DisplayPort one day.
Digital signage
Unaffordable to a consumer.
Bullshit they’re all over ebay for reasonable prices
There are a few. Samsung, hi sense and lg have them on some
Why even buy 'em, tho? They’re basically shitty monitors with spyware for brains.
Well if you want anything over 35 inches a TV is your only option. They don’t really make monitors bigger than that.
Because we don’t all live in dorm rooms sitting at desks watching TV. Some of us need something besides a 32-in.
I have enough back problems to remember a time when a 32 inch television WAS a big-screen. My family had a 35 inch Sony Trinitron that weighted as much as a motorcycle. You do not NEED a 50+ inch screen.
I’m 43. I remember those days as well. It was shit.
I’m 38, and I remember the last gasps of CRTs in the early 2000s more fondly than the colicky 10-year toddlerhood of digital flat panels that followed.
I’m 40 and my only TV is a 13" CRT that I’m rocking for movies and games
I mean, you also had pretty low quality TV and home media, anything beyond 32 inches wasn’t doing much good for you.
Projectors have improved dramatically over the years. Any white wall can easily become a 100+inch display that’s good enough for movies.
Are there a lot of 65" PC monitors?
Alienware once sold a 55" 120Hz OLED monitor.
Edit: It originally cost $4000
about the same specs as my TV, but 10" less and 4x its price
Technically those menu boards at restaurants.
Not that many it seems… Ignoring extremely pricey ones, I could find the Lenovo ThinkVision E65 LFD for what converts to 1200 USD in a local shop. And even that is not really price competitive.
They are exist but it Chinese dark horses manufacturera liki kiwi
That’s why HDMI needs to die and display port needs to take over. The TV industry is too big for that to happen of course. They make a shit ton of money off of HDMI
Can we just do display port then?
Sounds good to me
AMD should remove the HDMI port from all of their GPUs as a nice F.U. to the HDMI forum. They shouldn’t be paying the licensing fees if they are not allowed to make full use of the hardware.
That’d be suicide.
There would be uproar, but like the audio jack on phones people would come around. All it would take is one big enough company to pull it off, and the rest would follow.
Apple could remove the audio jack from iPhones because 1. They’re Apple. They could remove the eyes from their customers and 9/10ths of them would stay loyal. and 2. Eliminating the headphone jack mostly locked people out of $20 or less earbuds that might have come free with a previous phone anyway. People grumbled, and carried on using the Bluetooth headphones a lot of them already owned.
AMD doesn’t have the following that Apple does; they’re the objectively worse but more affordable alternative to Nvidia. Eliminating the HDMI port would lock themselves out of the HTPC market entirely; anyone who wanted to connect a PC to a TV would find their products impossible to use, not without experience ruining adapter dongles. We’re talking about making machines that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars incompatible.
Considering most gaming consoles use AMD hardware, they’d be having to keep up on licensing for those products as well.
Just bought a new phone that has an audio jack. Some of us refuse to “come around”. They can fit a stylus and an audio jack in this thing. Why did they remove the audio jack again? Not enough room? Bullshit
The point isn’t whether it’s needed or not. It’s not about space or features. The point is that a major player made a design decision and bucked the system. And while there may still be some phones with audio jacks, the majority of mainstream phones don’t. That major player is still successful, and other companies followed suit.
Can we agree this is what should happen to HDMI. No?
tbh I looked at audio jacks in internals, and they do usually have double the footprint on a pcb than what you see outside of it, at least on low end consumer devices:
That’s not to say that they couldn’t put anything more compact in a highend device like a smart phone.
Okay but I have a usbc slot, speakers, stylus, and an audio jack all on the bottom of my new phone. It’s bullshit that they needed the room as evidenced by this 2025 phone.
It can also use an sdcard. Greedy fucking corporations just wanting you to repurchase stuff you already have.
There are sane reasons to ditch an audio port. Like, physical connectors are fragile. Why use something that’s so often broken, when you don’t need to? Why include circuitry for something that you don’t need? At this point, physical audio ports are there for backwards compatibility. I’m not saying wired headphones are bad - I have wired headphones - but phones are the least useful place for them.
None of those reasons are the reasons that were stated for removing it from devices by the manufacturers.
No, because electronics aren’t alive
🤦♂️
Fuck you HDMI Forum
maybe there is an actual explanation for HDMI Forum’s decision that I am missing.
HDMI has never been an open standard (to the best of my understanding anyway). You’ve always needed to be an adopter or a member of HDMI forum to get the latest (or future) specs. So it’s not like they’ve just rejected a new idea. The rejection is fully consistent with their entire history of keeping the latest versions on lockdown.
Standards organizations like HDMI Forum look like a monolith from the outside (like “they should explain their thinking here”) but really they are loosely coupled amalgamations of hundreds of companies, all of whom are working hard to make sure that (a) their patents are (and remain) essential, and that (b) nothing mandatory in a new version of the standard threatens their business. Think of it more like the UN General Assembly than a unified group of participants. Their likely isn’t a unified thinking other than that many Forum members are also participants in the patent licensing pool, so giving away something for which they collect royalties is just not a normal thought. Like… they’re not gonna give something away without getting something in return.
I was a member of HDMI Forum for a brief while. Standards bodies like tihs are a bit of a weird world where motivations are often quite opaque.
HDMI has never been an open standard (to the best of my understanding anyway). You’ve always needed to be an adopter or a member of HDMI forum to get the latest (or future) specs. So it’s not like they’ve just rejected a new idea.
Okay not publishing the spec is still the same, but something else is new nonetheless.
AMD is an adopter*, they have the spec and they implemented a driver for 2.1 intended to be open sourced in Linux. But they were still blocked from publishing it. For HDMI 1.4 that wasn’t an issue yet from what I’ve found (though it’s always hard to search for non-existence). Open source implementations of HDMI 1.4, even in hardware description languages, seem to exist.
*you can search for “ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES” here to confirm for yourself
I may have misread or misunderstood the article, but it seemed as though Steam wanted to open source their 2.1 implementation, which would effectively publish the 2.1 specification. I’m pretty sure their agreements with HDMI Forum and HDMI.org prohibit that.
You want companies to stop supporting and using your shitty standard? Because that is how you get customers ntonstop using your standard and by extension, your companies
Thanks for sharing these insights.
💸 (and control) is the reason.
let’s make usb and displayport open-source drivers. seriously!
How good and capable are DP to HDMI adapters?
It depends on the adapter, but from the ones I’ve encountered they are limited to 30fps at 4k.
Time to kill HDMI with USB 4/TB bring those cost way down.
Display Port would be better suited to do all of those things.
Usb-c supports DisplayPort! Long live open standards!
Except DisplayPort has high data transfer speed requirements and many cables that fit the nice reversible ports do not support it.
Source: me testing every cable at home to find one that supports DP + PD
We really do need better cable identification standards for usb-c. Like electrical and cat cables have had this better addressed for a while now.
Yes, this isn’t new but it’s resurfacing thanks to the Steam Machine. Basically (off my memory), part of your title is accurate: AMD did create a FOSS driver with HDMI 2.1 which does not violate HDMI forum requirements, but the HDMI forum still vetoed it. I don’t know if it would necessarily “disclose the specification” as the first part of your title suggests, but I didn’t dig into the details enough to say for certain.
Basically a dick move by HDMI. Maybe Valve can push their weight on this, we’ll see.
I quoted the link. I do not have more insights.
Be a damn shame if someone leaked the driver.
Or even better, drop HDMI support in favor of displayport
I’m wondering if Valve might just include a DP to HDMI cable for the Steam Machine - since it includes DP.
Not sure it’s economically viable for device makers to drop HDMI altogether since TVs will never do that
If they sell 2 variants of the Steam Machine, they could remove HDMI from one , and just put it in the more expensive variant, to reflect the extra headaches and cost that comes from HDMI.
That’d encourage people to get screens with DisplayPort. Many computer screens have DP.
I wish we just fuck HDMI group and switch to open standard display port but we are not control of TV manufactures cause they are who crested HDMI group
Be a shame if it leaked on the internet.
It probably already has been, and Steam likely already has the specification. They just can’t open source an HDMI 2.1 implementation without consequences.
I’ve got a feeling this is specifically related to DRM in the HDMI spec that prevents video capture of encrypted content. Maybe I’m remembering something vaguely from about a decade ago about HDMI content encryption that is no longer relevant, but my hazy memory is that this was a core element of the HDMI spec that media corps wanted to prevent digital copying. Not that it really means anything at this point, the seas are full of high quality rips regardless, but maybe there is some dubious legal value in preventing an open source driver?
The HDMI forum blow goats, every month, by the silvery light of the moon.
