Posted by OsrsNeedsf2P 9 hours ago
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.
IP vs AI, round two, Fight!!!
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.
- 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.
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.
I do think there's value and a lot of work in coming up with a standard that manufacturers agree on. It's a huge coordination problem, based on the idea of unlinking a standard's success with the success of, say, a hardware competitor. It's real work! And like.... HDMI is an invention, right? If that isn't then what is?
"we should have drivers for the hardware that relies on this tech" just feels like an obvious win to me though. The (short-term) ideal here is just the forum being like "yes it's good if HDMI 2.1 works on linux" and that being the end of the story
I don't have much love for things that mean that like VGA info online all being "we reverse engineered this!!!" so they're not my friends but I wouldn't succeed much at standards coordination
No.
>What if ... just for my own hardware?
No.
>What if I just want certain select partners?
Sure, you can select between the DoD or Langley.
How about something big: TCP? RFC9293. It's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293.
HTML? Different organisation but the same idea, it's over here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
You're reading this web page because of standards organisations that gave everything away for free for anyone to implement.
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.
"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.
Only if you want people to use it. Developing a protocol is an investment in defining the direction a technology follows; the benefits are not best accrued by charging for access to the standard, but rather by leveraging the ability to direct the trend.
The alternative is that the licensing charge causes a bunch of stupid friction and prevents the standard from being truly universal.
EDIT: Implementing a standard is enough work, paying for the privilege to do so is often a non-starter.
This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.
(I don't actually know what I think off the cuff - but it's the obvious follow on question to your statement and I don't think your statement can stand on it's own without a well argued counter)
(this is of course looking at interoperation standards - regulatory bodies are going to be more concerned with e.g. safety standards)
Define "public standard". And how is HDMI one of them?
HDMI is a private bundle of IP that the license holders are free to give (or not give) to anyone. We're not talking about a statue by a government 'of the people' what should be public. No one is mandated by any government to implement it AFAICT: and even if it was, it would be up to the government to make sure they only reference publicly available documents in laws.
I think it is reasonable to complain when "someone" is being so hypocritical and arguably engaging in anti-competitive practices. How do the crazy NDAs in any way server the self stated mission of the forum?
> [1] https://hdmiforum.org/about/
Chartered as a nonprofit, mutual benefit corporation, the mission of the HDMI Forum is to:
Create and develop new versions of the HDMI Specification and the Compliance Test Specification, incorporating new and improved functionality
Encourage and promote the adoption and widespread use of its Specifications worldwide
Support an ecosystem of fully interoperable HDMI-enabled products
Provide an open and non-discriminatory licensing program with respect to its SpecificationsAnd the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
(Of course, it's fucked up that corporations can siphon up all this content and then try to twist the law to carve out an exception for their extra special use case. Information still isn't free unless you're an AI company, I guess.)
IP infringement is what we're used to talking about. This is when I go and give a stranger a copy of some music I don't own. Or when some sketchy ass guy resells IPTV services to an entire island in Greece or whatever. They're not saying it's their work, they're just refusing to pay the appropriate licensing fee for it. And sometimes we might even agree that a license fee shouldn't have to be paid. What the Linux video driver people want is for the HDMI people to say "yes, you can tell people how to light up this video card in such a way that it successfully negotiates a connection at HDMI 2.1 bitrates", which shouldn't even be infringement at all, but here we are.
What China does is wholesale IP theft. They don't just make their own version of someone else's thing, or just do industrial espionage, they actively make an attempt to deny the original creator of their own work. This can include things like forcing foreign entities to go through a JV, or playing games with trademark law to allow domestic companies to actually take legal ownership over foreign works. This is why a lot of American companies spent time and money carrying water for Xi Jinping, despite it going against everything they claimed to stand for.
AI training doesn't fit in either mold. It's more like rugpulling human labor by turning know-how and creativity into ownable capital distinct from that of traditional copyright and patents. Copyright gives you ownership over your own work, but says nothing about having your entire craft being automated away by a robot that can turn your work into legally distinct knockoffs of it[0]. So we have an entirely new form of enclosure of the commons, where if you ever do a thing, someone else can turn that thing into their own property that everyone else can pay to rent. Like, to be clear: AI is not Napster. AI is the opposite of Napster. AI is the apotheosis of "you will own nothing and be happy".
[0] The only way that copyright claims on AI even sort of fit into recognizable harms is the fact that at some point a Facebook engineer pointed LLaMA's crawler at a torrent site. In fact, I kinda hate how this is sort of saying "well actually fair use only applies if you bought the book first". Which is a problem, because the condition of sale can be "don't make a fair use of it", and the only way to avoid that was to pirate the work and then make your fair use.
[1] As Cory Doctorow said, paraphrasing: Intellectual property is the laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors.
Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
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?
> Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?
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.
unfortunately there are examples in the Telecom world
Back to the the HDMI standard, the licensing fee has already been paid by the hardware manufacturer. Restricting software is unnecessary, as the patent license fees have already been collected on the device.
I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?
> and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues
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.
I don't know. I have an LG TV and it does not support turning the display on/off with HDMI CEC. Everything else seems to work but it intentionally ignores those commands.
Option 1 (Hidden Menu Method)
* Press the Mute button repeatedly until the hidden menu appears; ensure Auto Power Sync is enabled.
* Go to General → Devices → TV Management and disable Quick Start+.
* Go to General → System → Additional Settings → Home Settings and turn off both options.
Option 2 (Settings Menu Method, webOS)
* Press Settings on the remote and open All Settings.
* Navigate to General → Devices.
* Turn SIMPLINK (HDMI-CEC) ON. (webOS 6.0+, enabling SIMPLINK automatically enables external device control).
Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPort is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.
The only potential issue is that they seem to be slow waking up from sleep. I've never been interested enough to investigate if moving the PC closer with shorter cables fixes that, or whether it's just an issue with having 2 monitors. I think the underlying cause is actually just because it's Windows and that one monitor (they're supposed to be identical) seems to wake up earlier than the other, so it briefly flashes on, then goes black while it reconfigures for 2 screens and then on again.
But anyway, my 5m cable runs seem fine. They weren't especially expensive nor especially cheap cables, IIRC around 10-15 GBP each.
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...
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.
I'm pretty sure they also moved a lot of stuff to a closed source user-space component, right?
This quote from that readme also seems to indicate a required user-space component that I'm pretty sure is not open sourced?
> Note that the kernel modules built here must be used with GSP firmware and user-space NVIDIA GPU driver components from a corresponding 590.44.01 driver release
Since it's closed we can't really know for sure if anything was moved to it from the kernel, but I think it's quite unlikely something like HDMI link setup was moved to user-space instead of to firmware.
That might not matter much for an ordinary PC, but this Steam Machine will be competing for the living room with the PS5 and Xbox which have Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc; Not sure if things like Spotify are HDCP-protected.
It will be interesting to see how Valve works out the kinks for that. Honestly in general it'll be interesting, because putting those things on Steam Store basically turns Steam Store into a general software store instead of a game store. And the only cross-platform store at that.
With iOS and Android being broken open, you could have games be completely cross-licensed. I'd say other software too, but sadly with everything going the subscription model, you usually already have cross-licensing, in the form of an account.
The suit over usage of "HDMI" in a reverse engineered version would wind up arguing whether or not HDMI is a genericised term and the HDMI Forum would lose their trademark. They will throw every cent they have into preventing such a decision and it'll get ugly
One doesn't get to use the logo or even the typeface, but that's not a dealbreaker at all for the purposes being discussed here. Words themselves are OK (and initialisms, such as "HDMI," are just a subset of words like nouns and verbs are).
The wiki has some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
Isn't that actually a pretty good workaround? Hardware vendor pays for the license, implements the standard, sells the hardware. Linux kernel has a compatible implementation, relying on the first sale doctrine to use the patent license that came with the hardware, and then you could run it on any hardware that has the port (and thereby the license). What's the problem?
First-sale doctrine protects against copyright or trademark infringement. You might be thinking of "patent exhaustion"[1], which is a mostly US-specific court doctrine that prevents patent holders from enforcing license terms against eventual purchasers of the patented invention. There is no "transitive law of patent licensing", so-to-speak.
In this case, it would still not protect Valve if they exercise each claim in the relevant patents by including both hardware and an unlicensed implementation of the software process. It would protect end users who purchased the licensed hardware and chose to independently install drivers which are not covered by the license.
It's murky if Valve would infringe by some DeCSS-like scheme whereby they direct users to install a third-party HDMI 2.1 driver implementation on first boot, but I don't think they would risk their existing HDMI license by doing so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
In some jurisdictions, yes; however, some would probably still distribute it anyway, on purpose or not. I doubt all of them would get sued either, since lawsuits are expensive and difficult.
From my perspective, the objective is to make enforcement impractical.
Could it actually be made? I kind of wonder that. Like if one of the things you have to do is claim to the other device that you’re 2.1 would that get you in trouble? Or if you just advertise all the features and they each work is that good enough?
My only concern there is the protocol stuff I mentioned.
nintendo tried that with the gameboy. games had to have a copy of the nintendo logo in them. i dont think it was ever tested in court though.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
Basically a week-end project...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
The courts said that was fine, and whenever that happens, lawyers are going to tell people to do it exactly like that since it's a known-good way to do it, whereas some other way is maybe and who wants a maybe if you have the option to lockstep the process that was previously approved?
Of course, if you do it a different way and then that gets approved, things change. But only after somebody actually goes to court over it, which generally nobody enjoys, not least because the outcome is uncertain.
This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".
You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
It worked out pretty okay for DVD Jon but I imagine it was a little scary for his dad and brother at the time.
What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now.
Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it.
For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes.
We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance.
It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.
It's super lame though. It will be great to watch the downfall of HDMI Forum when their artificial dam against DisplayPort in the living room finally breaks.
Actually it’s a bit odd, in my mind DisplayPort is highly associated with quality. But I don’t actually know if it is the superior connector or if it just seems that way because monitors are usually better than TVs in every metric other than size and brightness.
Also, HDMI Forum don't like converter boards that support every advanced feature at once (Variable Refresh Rate, HDR, etc.) and won't license them.
DisplayPort and HDMI kind of leapfrog each other in terms of technical superiority, so neither is definitively technically superior in the long term.
It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.
The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.
Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.
So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.
Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.
Is there anything other than the money and desire to do so stopping 100 well-heeled Linux users from joining up and packing the board with open source-friendly directors who would as their first official act grant AMD permission to release its driver?
But yes, it wouldn’t be much to do.
DRM is optional with DisplayPort but mandatory with HDMI.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081218170701/http://www.hdmi.o...
> For each end-user Licensed Product, fifteen cents (US$0.15) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter reasonably uses the HDMI logo on the product and promotional materials, then the rate drops to five cents (US$0.05) per unit sold.
> If the Adopter implements HDCP content protection as set forth in the HDMI Specification, then the royalty rate is further reduced by one cent (US$0.01) per unit sold, for a lowest rate of four cents (US$0.04) per unit.
In particular the link training procedures needed to reliably push 48 Gbit/s over copper are probably very non-trivial, and could be considered "secret sauce".
So, after a transition period, cost-saving will eventually lead to DisplayPort taking over.
I think CEC support is still spotty and ARC (audio return channel) isn't supported at all in DP.
[1]: If you have a stack that works, I'm happy for you, but trust you're just lucky to have a working combination.
I would vote with my wallet … if I could.
Like, why do we need two connectors, for the same thing? DP is clearly technically superior.
Of course, there's a wide range of issues: there's a number of comments on this article stating how the HDMI forum is manipulating the market (e.g., by suppressing competitor connectors on the board, offering lower royalties for bugs, suppressing specifications), and then there's just getting out-competed by the litany of consumers who have no idea and do not care to know what they are buying, and marketplaces like Amazon that promote mystery-meat wares.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2].
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
2. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
Nobody cares if the mailing list where they discuss the upcoming specs is managed by a non-profit, the broader HDMI ecosystem is still a massive money grab.
Also a non-profit is just that, its not a charity. A charity is an entirely other classification and even those are regularly used and abused like this.
Non-profit is a business arrangement where making money isn't the goal. There are many different versions of one though: many local clubs are a non-profit and they exist only for the benefit of their members.
Anyone can then implement opensource driver based on that and distribute it freely, since NDA won't apply to them.
Call it a imdh driver then, nobody cares as long as it works.
https://www.facebook.com/HDMIForum/
https://twitter.com/HDMIForum/
(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.)
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.
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.
Like you say, not that much difference, but enough to make DP1.4 not an option
You can use this to check: https://trychen.com/feature/video-bandwidth
It requires I use the DisplayPort out on Linux because I can't use HDMI 2.1. Because the motherboard has only 1 each of DisplayPort and HDMI this limits my second screen.
Even a raspberry pi 4 or newer has dual 4k outputs, that can fill the entire screen at native resolution. Macs have been the worst to use with it so far.
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.
VRR and HDR are presumably the biggest issues, because HDMI 2.0 should already have enough bandwith to support 8-bit 2160p120 with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which should work fine for most SDR games, and 144 Hz vs 120 Hz is, in my experience at least, not noticeably different enough to be worth fussing over.
Some people will want to use their Steam Machine as a general-purpose desktop, of course, where RGB or 4:2:2 is nonnegotiable. Though in this case 120 Hz — or 120,000/1001 Hz, thanks NTSC — is, again in my experience, superior to 144 Hz as it avoids frame pacing issues with 30/60 Hz video.
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.
And they are in a good position to unblock this situation by increasing adoption of patent free alternatives, therefore I don't see why they wouldn't have an incentive to avoid paying.
So I'd rather see them as somehow complicit then, instead of having no incentive in this case.
So this needs to be an industry-wide switch, not just TV makers.
So the argument of no incentives just doesn't make sense, but it's a gradual process to get there. Unless their bean counters only understand super short term incentives. Then they should be blamed too for why things aren't improving in this regard.
The winning move is not to play. The HDMI Forum (and other orgs that behave similarly) prey on our desire for the most/best/(insert superlative here). I get that there's no free lunch. It is also true you see a lot of initiatives and projects do a lot of collective good while demanding much less.
https://www.club-3d.com/shop/cac-1087-1128 (3m cable version)
DP 1.4 → HDMI 2.1. Apparently they're no longer being manufactured (?? - not sure that's correct), so get one while it's still possible...
[Ed.: accidentally linked another adapter that is the other direction. Added 3m & direct manufacturer links.]
I bought one from UGREEN on Amazon. I think it's called the 9 in 1. It does 4k@60 with HDR, coming out of SteamOS.
The only setup I have that doesn't is a super minimal one that has a single DP out that feeds a daisy-chain (and a single USB out that feeds a simple hub for low bandwidth peripherals, and a PD in). Unfortunately, most of the screen pairs that I run don't do daisy-chain.
Every other hub I tried eventually got me to give up and connect one of the screens through direct HDMI.
The UGREEN 8K@60Hz Display Port to HDMI Adapter I have sitting here supports g-sync (and claims support for freesync).