Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 170 posts

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#41

Post by salviati »

rickdeckard wrote: post #19
ZiiS wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone without contracts with the HDMI Forum can probably release a working driver. However, AMD obviously needs to license the logo for their GPU boxes and their legal team have decided this prevents them releasing any source code based on the private specification regardless of what the code is called.

Also, that someone without contracts would probably need to call it different than "HDMI", because the term itself is trademarked and only licensed to Members (like "Wi-Fi" and "Bluetooth"). So a different term would be needed (like "WLAN" or "BT" is used by non-members)

I checked and found this info from the Wi-Fi Alliance [0]:

> Select brands and logos are offered license free and intended to be used widely throughout the Wi-Fi ecosystem by Wi-Fi Alliance members, non-members, industry partners, media, and analysts to describe products, technology, network deployments, and operating system support.

It sounds to me like anyone could use the trademark "Wi-Fi", since it's listed in the freely available ones.

[0] https://www.wi-fi.org/who-we-are/our-brands

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#42

Post by poizan42 »

ysofunny wrote: post #40
echoangle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that the term being a trademark doesnt stop me from mentioning it when describing compatibility. Do you think apple could sue me if i release a program and say "This software is compatible with macOS"? As long as I am not impersonating them, using the Logo etc., they probably can not stop me.

i'm pretty sure apple would and could sue you if you do that. but it really depends on how much attention you get gotta keep an eye on the nintendo emulator lawsuit.... the war on general purpose computation carries on

Saying "compatible with " is if anything one of the best established examples of nominative use. Like PC-compatibles which IBM had no way of stopping. Apple could try to sue, but the case would get dismissed immediately.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#43

Post by tomohawk »

toxik wrote: post #31
mglz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. That's also why there is an ongoing trend to push users into walled gardens and onto hardware they do not control. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it the "war on general-purpose computing"

It's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.

To expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis.

When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it.

The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#44

Post by hnlmorg »

hobofan wrote: post #37
DeathArrow wrote: post #26

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for…

There’s plenty of examples of successful open standards out there. The real issue is that, when it comes to video, there’s a lot of money in closed solutions because of “piracy”.

The moment you want to control what people watch and how they watch it, you lose any hope of having an open standard.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#45

Post by hobofan »

ysofunny wrote: post #39
hobofan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for…

meaning that in practice we would have to fundamentally tweak how capitalism (maybe?) works somehow in the mean time keep paying taxes, rent, subscription, and utility bills. i'm not even sure it's capitalism that needs to get modified? maybe it's something about how private/public property works that is cleary off the mark and needs updates? I'd argue that in the internet specifically, open sourced implementations o…

In the purest of the pure internet, sure (depending on what level of the stack you look at). There you of course have other problems(?) like the fact that most browser-related standards are essentially steered by Google (via its dominance in browser market share). From the parts of the W3C that I've observed, I'd also not characterize them as a functioning standards body (I'm not sure they've published anything meaningful in the last decade).

But in many spaces where you interact with the "real world" you very quickly make contact with proprietary ISO standards (e.g. CAD, architecture). I'd argue that this is one of the big contributing factors to why there isn't more open source penetration in CAD, as central standards like STEP[2] would require contributors to purchase a number of ISO standards.

There are also some spaces where proprietary standards exist (usually when open implementations precede the standardized ones) like SQL[0], but the proprietary nature is ignored, as most people don't need their SQL implementations certified. AMD can't do that as they need to keep a friendly relation with the HDMI Forum for official certification.

There are also some ISO standards (associated with JTC1) that are open access[1], which seems like a decent model. I'm not sure who usually foots the bill for the whole standardization process here though.

[0]: https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html

[1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#46

Post by swiftcoder »

djxfade wrote: post #30
ttyyzz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connector (resp Port) was too chunky for laptops and you didnt get sound over dvi, but other than that it worked just Fine each and every time. Never had issues upgrading stuff from VGA to DVI in an industrial Environment back then.

Apple had a full-size DVI connector on their PowerBook G4 series of laptops.

All the G4 PowerBooks I remember used mini-DVI?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DVI

Which is cool, but not quite as cool as micro-DVI, which they used for exactly one MacBook Air generation before mini-DisplayPort arrived on the scene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-DVI

Edit: you are right though. I just pulled up pictures on early G4 variants, and there is indeed full-size DVI. I completely forgot that.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#47

Post by prmoustache »

Antip0dean wrote: post #11
zekica wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't miss it, DisplayPort is a really good replacement.

It is. And this is the likely to be the solution to this issue. DP is a VESA standard, and its Dual Mode feature supports passive adaptors for, among other things, HDMI displays. I use one on my 20-series RTX card. A cheap DP-HDMI dongle makes all this go away. As long as VESA doesn't behave the same way, anyway.

That works somewhat well for 1080p but all adapters I have seen max out at 30fps for 4K video. Might be ok for movies but gamers might not like it.

55" monitors with DisplayPort do exist but they are only a selected few and seem to cost 4 times the price of a 4K TV.

So 4K is still pretty much a luxury that I will just ignore for now.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#48

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

DeathArrow wrote: post #26

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

> proprietary formats and specifications such as ... DisplayPort

DisplayPort is not proprietary; it is a VESA standard.

> Lightning

If you owned any iPhone between 2012 and the present, you had to use Lightning, without choice. And for some inexplicable reason, Americans love iPhones.

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#49

Post by nonrandomstring »

hobofan wrote: post #37
DeathArrow wrote: post #26

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for…

> In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization

Here's a list of just the best known ones [0]. There are literally hundreds of thousands of open standards for everything from communications to mechanical engineering, to packaging to chemical formulas....

They make the world go round.

No piece of technology you use today, especially the Internet would function without open standards and standards bodies.

For some reason bits of the digital tech industry, in particular media and entertainments, have a parochial disconnection with the rest of reality and forget that they stand on the shoulders of giants and operate with the assent of everyone else in the world giving them the standards space within which to work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technical_standard_org...

Re: HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec

#50

Post by croes »

DeathArrow wrote: post #26

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

An open standard is pretty useless without hardware that uses it. The makers of proprietary formats know how to prevent that.
Post reply on HN