1y ago

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver | Linux users can't hit the same resolutions and speeds as Windows—or DisplayPort.

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver | Linux users can't hit the same resolutions and speeds as Windows—or DisplayPort.::Linux users can't hit the same resolutions and speeds as Windows—or DisplayPort.

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This is why DisplayPort is the better connector. Because they don't have their thumbs up their asses.
It always saddens me how much user pain has been caused and money wasted in implementing DRM which as far as I can tell hasn't succeeded in preventing a single movie or TV show from being available on torrent sites.
- Yep. DRM has been and continues to be a complete waste of everyone's time that only makes things worse for paying customers. Pirates get the best experience and then companies wonder why they struggle to get people to pay for inferior experiences. Gabe Newell hit the nail on the head over a decade ago when he said:
  The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.
  Instead companies keep doing the exact opposite, and surprise piracy isn't impacted at all.
  
  Gabe Newell really nailed it there. I buy tons of games on Steam. I also used to subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from Google. But now Netflix has junk and I need to subscribe to 10 services and they occasionally deleted my partner's downloaded shows while traveling because they couldn't validate the license. I can't even play HD videos from any legal retailer on any of my devices other than a Chromecast as they aren't under the media lobby's control.
  But say I was to download a movie from a torrent site. It would probably be a higher quality than streaming services would give me, I can play it offline with no concerns about license expiry and it will still be 4k on every device I choose to watch on. I could also take a screenshot and share to my friend (which may cause them to purchase that content!). It's basically all upsides. Maybe slightly more difficult to find the content than something like Google Play rentals, but really not much and the tradeoff is the greater choice of content available.
  It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.
  
  Yep, I used to pay for Netflix, now I just stream off a jellyfin server.
  
  And here I am not knowing the last time I pirated a game. It's been over a decade probably
  Meanwhile, I'm probably going to pirate Xenoblade Chronicals X as it's only available on the Wii U and fuck buying/renting one to deal with 1 game.
- It's one of the reasons. DisplayPort is better for purely technical reasons as well.
Wait, is that why I can’t do 4k144 on my desktop?! I never tried switching between HDMI/DP for that because they’re both capable of the bandwidth needed as far as the spec goes - I thought the issue was Gnome or something
- Likely, but DP is still superior to even the latest HDMI standards, so I'd choose it over HDMI whenever that's an option.
  
  I used to use it before the HDMI spec caught up, but they both now offered the same features for me (or so I thought) and the HDMI 2.1 cables I’ve got were thinner/easier to manage and hide so I swapped it out. I’m definitely gonna experiment later today and see if that’s indeed the issue, gonna be frustrating if it’s just patent/copyright garbage once again worsening user experience
  Update: For anyone wondering, this was indeed the issue and I’m able to run 4k144 perfectly over DP. I really didn’t even consider that being the problem until now given the spec parity, very dumb move from the HDMI forum
And this is folks how you alienate a whole swath of users all while not realizing those lobbying shitheads wouldn't have jobs without consumers.
Time to stop using this standard.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Any Linux user trying to send the highest-resolution images to a display at the fastest frame rate is out of luck for the foreseeable future, at least when it comes to an HDMI connection.
Alex Deucher, an AMD engineer who has long contributed to the company's open source offerings, has kept a related bug thread alive for at least two years, only to deliver the negative outcome yesterday.
In February 2023, Deucher reported that he was "working with our [AMD] legal team to sort out what we can deliver while still complying with our obligations to HDMI Forum."
Two months later, he said that AMD got "the basic functionality up and running, now we have to go through each of the features with legal and determine if/how we can expose them while still meeting our obligations."
Phoronix and some commenters have suggested potential interference from media firms concerned about digital video ripping.
It also suggests that AMD has to decide whether to implement newer HDMI support inside closed-source Linux drivers or simply point its most demanding customers to other options.
The original article contains 462 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is this because of HDCP?
- No, patents.
  
  So I still don't quite understand patents,
  Does it forbid someone from selling the intention? Making the invention? Can I not even make an invention for personal use if it's patented??
- A speculation, https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected, about HDCP, i.e. not exposing technical details as to prevent video copying, was offered.
- In practice probably largely. But I doubt they say explicitly.

31 comments