this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
It's pretty weird that this organization that exists only to extract rents from people who want to use hdmi remains unwilling to do so even for a customer as large as Valve. I wonder who has given them the motivation for it, and how much it cost them.
Their motivation is staying away from open platforms, and protecting their members' IP rights. Gotta thwart those pirates.
AMD is nearly 100x the size of Valve, and they couldn't get HDMI 2.1 approval on Linux. Nvidia somewhat has it with their proprietary drivers, but not nouveau.
They're not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.
The movie studios. As the person above said, the HDMI consortium (owned by movie studios) is focused on protecting their members IP rights from pirates. HDMI has built in DRM, that could be removed from an open source driver.
so what you’re saying is we need to make hdmi driver patches to allow direct file saving from video streams?
Well, one of the master keys leaked about 15 years back. A researcher posted a paper back in 2003 or so that outlined a method of finding a master key that was likely used by the people who made the release. It was a fun time to be on the internet, the people came together and said, yeah fuck those corpos and everyone reposted the key to every form of social media possible. I knew someone with the key tattooed on their arm (as part of their piracy themed artwork, I used to have pictures)
Now, that particular master key was patched out with a compatibility breaking upgrade, specifically 2.1 of the standard, which was proven to be broken in 2012, but there was less coming together to share it the second time, or the third for 2.2 of the standard.
But yes, if you wanted to code your own, you easily could. Just don't share it or the sue happy corpos will come knocking.
Huh I though that was hd-dvd
Could have been...
Both were about the same timeframe.
Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don't appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.
While Sony is a technology company, they're also a very sue happy IP holder through Sony pictures and Playstation.
Sony continues to be a major player on the HDMI forum.
I haveb't looked into this particular group, but usually it's patents. Someone owns a patent for the tech required to implement the standard, and they "license" it out to anyone who wants to implement that standard. Obviously, they won't agree to terms that hurt their ability to collect rent on their patent. Qualcomm is famously guilty of this in the modem space.
Does that seem stupid, to adopt an industry standard that requires patented technology to implement? That's because it is, and were we a sane society we would invalidate any patents that become an industry standard, but we're a bunch of idiots with a billionaire cuck fetish.
It's wild how much we flock around such shitty standards all the time, generation after generation.
We don't flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.
One of the biggest problems is that shitty standards use the money they get from licensing the standard to push the standard. Good open standards often don't have a marketing budget to play with. On top of that, shitty standards can make unrealistic promises to gain an advantage. Like HDMI does with DRM. "If every device uses this standard, piracy will be a thing of the past!"
Yes, that is what I meant, the 'we' used like an alien might observe us.
Theoretically we could stop buying TVs, but practically we are forced into it by supply.
And yes, licencing a standard beyond dev should be just illegal, it hurts (almost) everyone.