Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

Reading a standards spec to understand what the device you paid for does?

Straight to jail!

Pirating the entire internet to train your AI?

That's fair use.

Innocence until proven guilty should mean the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove you actually looked at it right? Although that isn't necessarily how it works in the real world. IANAL.

But I also don't understand how they would enforce that you can't use a leaked spec. If there are patents involved that would hinder an open source implementation regardless of if it was clean room or not. I don't think copyright would apply, because the implementation is not the same as the spec. And trademark would only apply if you used hdmi branding materials (so just say something like "this driver provides compatibility with an interface that has been hostile to open source that starts with h and ends with i"), and if you use a leaked spec, you didn't sign any contracts saying you can't implement it.

The game is getting sued by the HDMI forum. It doesn't matter how "clean" your implementation was. They're just going to sue you _anyways_.

IIUC, the problem is a bit tautological. Regardless of legality of reverse engineering itself, HDMI is a trademark which you obviously cannot use without being licensed. Using HDMI connector itself is probably a grey-ish area: while you can buy the connectors without agreeing to any licenses and forwarding compliance on vendor, it would still be hard to argue that you had no idea it was a HDMI connector. If you are using the HDMI connector, but are not sending anything else but DVI over it, it should be fine-ish.

The real problem starts when you want to actually support HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 on top. Arguing that you have licenced for 2.0 and then tacked a clean-room implementation of 2.1 on top gets essentially impossible.

AFAIK clean-room reverse engineering is sufficient but not always necessary for such an implementation to be allowed, but it does make the fair use argument a bit more difficult. (and of course the DMCA criminalizes any reverse engineering of 'technical safeguards' regardless of how you do it)

Clean room RE isn't legally required. It just makes a stronger defense against claims of infringement.

They don't really have to worry about patent infringement, the biggest issue is that they can implement anything they want, they just can't call it HDMI 2.1 without certification.

That's confusing for the consumer but technically viable.

HDMI exists to write standards, to certify them and to enforce the brand integrity. Patents are a different issue and would be handled separately.

(I am an engineer who spent half his career dealing with this stuff at a technical, legal and commercial level).

Clean room reverse engineering produces specification when you don't have it. When you have specification, you don't have to reverse engineer it.

I suspect Valve's plan is to embarrass the license holder in the hope that they back down. I doubt a court battle would be worth the money.

> The problem is that software distributors might break laws if the said drivers lands on unlicensed hdmi hardware

Assuming the diatributor doesn't claim the software or device is hdmi licensed, what laws would they be breaking?

debian and arch package managers ask you to accept EULAs when necessary to install, so the compliance infrastructure exists.

i think they are configured to auto-accept by default but that's been fine so far hasn't it

Sounds like what we used to go through years ago with sound editors that had to have a separate button for downloading and inserting the MP3 encoder because the Fraunhofer license prohibited it from being directly distributed with the software.

Post the patch in a country that doesn't care? I remember OpenBSD used to do something similar with encryption to get around US laws.

I need to post this everywhere:

THIS ISN'T AN IP/PATENT ISSUE!

This is branding and marketing issue. Anyone can implement the spec, it doesn't need to be a cleanroom implementation. It's almost certain that you could license the patents from the patent holders because HDMI doesn't develop it's own patentable stuff, they just get it from Sony, Panasonic, etc.

THIS IS A MARKETING / BRANDING ISSUE.

Saying they don't want an open source implementation is just a smokescreen. 99% of the implementation is in hardware anyway.

If you take the effort to anonymise your contributions, can they afford to try to find you?

It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee.

Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.

Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH.

It's sad what people put up with now.

> This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.

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.

From the article:

> 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?

> They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP".

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.

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.

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."

Yes, and we should say "no more making money from stupid things like secret technical standards"

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.

How much money could PCI SIG possibly be making for the rightsholders with those fees? They’re not charged to members, they’re not per-seat (so each company only needs to pay once even if they have 100 engineers that need to read it), and they don’t include patent licenses for shipping actual hardware. Nobody’s business model is threatened even slightly by making the standards public.

And as we saw with AV1 vs H.265, the IP encumbrance of multiparty standards can create barriers that kill their adoption and the corresponding ability for rightsholders to make money off them. It looks like that family of encodings is going to die off, with basically zero interest from anybody in licensing H.266 when you’ll be able to build AV2 software and hardware for free.

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.

Are you sure that's what's in play here? I don't think anyone gives a shit about using HDMI. They want video and audio to work on their TV.

Now tell me how many TVs with non-HDMI ports are out there, and tell me with a straight face that it isn't due to pressure from the "consortium".

Edit: by the way the video signaling was identical between DVI and HDMI in the beginning. So whose hard work was it?

"Hard work" is the worst way to make money at scale, so that argument rings more than just a little hollow, especially when defending access control based moneymaking.

Anti competitive "standard business practices" should be counteracted with good enough competition law that forbids them. As simple as that. So I totally agree with the above comment. They simply shouldn't be able to prevent open implementations.

you are confusing standards with patents.

Your claim is weird.

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.

> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular.

I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?

I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?

Bad example, the 3GPP standards are not at all closed like HDMI 2.1 is, unlike HDMI 2.1 there are open source implementations https://osmocom.org/projects

Are you referring to the 3GPP specifications that you, I or anyone else can go and read absolutely free of charge?

https://www.3gpp.org/

> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular.

What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?

That sounds wonderful. A world without widespread high bandwidth wireless connectivity would be a better world.

Yes and no. HDMI CEC works pretty decent these days, all the kinks have been worked out over the years and the only time it bugs out is if you use Chinese brands (looking at you, TCL) that write horrid firmware and never fix any bugs found after release.

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.

As long as you are okay with a 1-3m long cable.

Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPort is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i...

Maybe one day I can pirate an HDMI driver

If they have a working driver since 2 years ago, couldn't they just release it to the community? I imagine most gamers would typically be capable/ok with that.

Are they rejecting the driver because of it being open source? There are specific modules I use in my AMD card that require closed proprietary driver add-ons for example such as AMF.

Not defending the HDMI forum here, but perhaps Valve / AMD have a way of including a proprietary blob in SteamOS (I don't think most gamers would care)

So just drop off a patch somewhere by "accident" and have someone else merge it. What are they gonna do?

The pixel density, among other things, are very different between a TV and a Monitor. This is why a monitor of similar size will be vastly more expensive than a TV - they're optimized for different viewing experiences/use-cases.

For a simple example, a TV usually assumes the viewer isn't sitting just inches away from it...

Before HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort already supports high refresh rates (greater than 120Hz) at high resolutions. Also many high-end PC graphics cards offer more DisplayPort ports than HDMI.

That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort is a massive reason I think they deserve to have their building surrounded by angry people with pitchforks and torches. Anti-competitive abusers, doing awful things to prevent a better world.

DisplayPort actually makes sense as a digital protocol, where-as HDMI inherits all the insane baggage of the analog past & just sucks. HDMI is so awful.

There is the vesa standards organization with a pretty good history of successful display connections standards vga(analog video) dvi(digital video) and displayport(packet video) and very little drama affecting the end user with how the connection is used.

Contrast this with the hdmi consortium which put together the hdmi standard. originally hdmi was just dvi with a built in audio channel. and while I will concede that the audio channel was a killer feature and resulted in the huge success of hdmi. They really did very little technical work and what work they did do was end user hostile (hdcp rights management)

It really is too bad that display-port is sort of relegated to computer monitors as it is better designed and less end user hostile than hdmi. but hdmi with it's built in audio channel won the market for digital video connections and by the time display port was out people were, understandably, reluctant to switch again. While display port is better, it is not enough better to be for the end user to care.

Have you even bothered reading any discussion here? I can't downvote you but its easy to see why others did so, a very lazy and clueless comment about very basic of tech everybody uses, on Hacker news. You can for sure do better.

No, but now that you mention it, I'm curious about the five posts to the official US Federal Bureau of Prisons Instagram[1], which, unlike their Facebook and Twitter accounts, is private.

(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.)

[1] https://www.instagram.com/bureauofprisons/

Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).

1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

And IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.

What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?

Why on earth is a connector standard secret?

I wonder if the license dictates that you must use a specific language, or if they could ship that proprietary component in Javascript. My understanding is that well-written JS with a JIT runtime can be very close to native performance. Not only would that make fun of the forum's requirements, it would also provide transparency about what the proprietary module does on your system exactly

And what if they just do it anyway? What are they going to do, sue them? Make them scrub every git repository on the planet?

Can't we just leak the spec?

Anyone can then implement opensource driver based on that and distribute it freely, since NDA won't apply to them.

Would someone doing a clean room reverse engineering be permissible to then share would they built?

Club3D makes some dongles that will convert from DP 1.4 with DSC to HDMI 2.1, actually. The only ones I've used personally are physically USB-C (DP alt mode) on the DP end, though. But they make some that are mDP and have DSC support as well, and they might also have one for full-sized DP, although I bet it requires external power.

Edit: The article claims that a good Club3D adapter for this has disappeared. Yeah, there is an old Club3D adapter (CAC-1085) for this and it's not around anymore (and it does require external power!). But it's been superseded by a newer one (CAC-1088) which is still available on Amazon, at least in the US. (And the new one is bus-powered.)

From the manufacturer: https://www.club-3d.com/shop/cac-1088-1223

on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4FTWLCJ

Nvidia's private driver seems to deliver 4k@120Hz just fine.

To be fair, the DisplayPort 2.0/2.1 standardisation process was riddled with delays and they ended up landing years after HDMI 2.1 did. It stands to reason that hardware manufacturers picked up the earlier spec first.

what resolution is it that you can drive with "newer HDMI versions" but you cannot drive with DisplayPort 1.4 w/o DSC? The bandwidth difference is not really that much in practice, and "newer HDMI versions" also rely on DSC, or worse, chroma subsampling (objectively and subjectively worse).

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.

I think you'd have bigger issues trying to drive that monitor with an iGPU

the problem only affect a subset of HDMI 2.1 features, not HDMI 2.0

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.

> "Just don't support the majority of consumer displays" isn't really an acceptable solution for an organization attempting to be a player in the home entertainment industry.

I would recommend Valve to create an official list of consumer displays that ("certified by Valve") do have proper support for the most recent version of Display Port with support for all features relevant to gaming.

This way gamers know which display to buy next, and display vendors get free advertising for their efforts that is circulated to an audience that is very willing to buy a display in the near future.

Aren't DP-HDMI adapters good enough for the majority of consumers? On my ancient (2017) PC with integrated graphics I can't tell a difference between the DP out vs the HDMI out.

err, that's what Valve is doing?

So why can't Samsung and LG do more do improve this mess and put USB 4 / DisplayPort in all their TVs?

Is there a non-LLM source for that?

We're really just relying on LLMs to tell us things with no verification now?

Interesting, did the llm provide the sources for that info ?

Please don't post random LLM slop on HN, there's more than enough of it on the internet as is. The value of HN is the human discussion. Everyone here is capable of using an LLM if they so desire.

What a road down the memory lane… Club 3D GPUs in the early 2000s

Ty for the links! I’ll look into this.

But are there any that don't overheat when you try to funnel dual screens through the USB-C/TB4?

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.

But does it support VRR?

I’ve never thought about trying a dock. Thanks!

Going to be watching this ticket for sure.

I think the article is honestly a little outdated on this point. The last couple of years the adapter market has caught up pretty well.

The UGREEN 8K@60Hz Display Port to HDMI Adapter I have sitting here supports g-sync (and claims support for freesync).

Why does everybody seem to overlook this?