4 ms·

> However, I’d like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort – it’s an interface powerful in a way that we haven’t seen before. L

> However, I’d like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort – it’s an interface powerful in a way that we haven’t seen before. Lines like that really show just how long it can take for standards to get on the radar of mainstream tech culture. I remember hearing about and being excited about DisplayPort's move to packetized digital video in college in 2008, and seeing the first Macs with MiniDisplay port later that year (or perhaps it was in 2009)! I was actually under the impression that it has been well-known and commonplace for hobbyist and enthusiast PCs for well over 10 years, but I'm probably wrong about that!

hot_gril 3y ago
That, and a similar line might've been said about FireWire, which didn't really make it.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Maybe I agree with that, but I also know that firewire helped usher in the digital video era. It allowed the transition from tape based acquisition when media cards were prohibitively expensive. Audio/Video/Deck control all down one single cable straight from the camera to the computer was what really kicked the prosumer market into being able to lean closer to pro than consumer. Now that media cards are actually affordable, that does seem like ancient history. I could see how you might think of firewire as a failure if you're looking at it as a USB type transition, but for the camera/video professions, it served a very good purpose even if short lived
  - pdmccormick 3y ago
    I once purchased a FireWire multi-channel audio interface with the express intent of reverse engineering the protocol in order to add Linux support. I purchased a specialized PCI card that was intentionally non-standard (not OHCI 1394) but could snoop and capture traffic between a device and a host. I chipped away at deciphering a register map for awhile, but eventually better USB audio devices came along that had more driver support. Still trying to do the same sort of thing though with some audio related USB and Ethernet/IP devices so I guess I never really gave up the idea in my heart!
    - dylan604 3y ago
      you are a glutton for punishment. a hacker after my own heart! i have so many unfinished things where i just knew something could be figured out, only to not succeed. but it sure is fun trying on top of learning new things as well.
    - NewJazz 3y ago
      Do the USB devices have comparable round trip latency? That is where USB really hurts and where the Thunderbolt audio interfaces seem to fond their niche today. I'm looking forward to audio interfaces that can do USB4 wrapped PCIe, but for now I live with the latency on Linux.
      - Blackthorn 3y ago
        RTL latency doesn't seem that bad on chips that are built for the purpose, like RME's. Just the off the shelf stuff might be less than ideal. If anything I think a problem is there's just overall too much slop in the whole chain, including the operating system, motherboard, whatever else. It's a little ridiculous that a $50 guitar pedal can easily get better RTL numbers than a $1500 computer system.
        CameronNemo 3y ago
        Linux has preempt_rt pretty conveniently accessible, and Pipewire has some useful tuning knobs, but my Steinberg UR44 can't seem to keep up.
        nyanpasu64 3y ago
        Are you already aware of the PipeWire batch flags which add additional latency to USB audio devices (dependent on ALSA period rather than quantum)? https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/configuration/alsa.html#alsa-buffer-properties https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/configura...
        3y ago
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Yeah, FireWire was a necessity at the time for certain use cases. Even basic consumer digital camcorders required FW400 to pull onto a PC.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I maybe mis-remembering, but was it possible to add FireWire to an existing PC with an expansion card? I know Thunderbolt was not possible from 3rd party vendors and only the mobo manufacturers could offer a card. I bought one to make a Hackintosh, but then a mobo firmware disabled the card because they didn't want to support it. I seem to recall Firewire being the same way
      - gsich 3y ago
        yes, still is.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        Yes it was. Still is. I almost bought a FireWire card so I could use an iPod with Windows before the USB model came out. I also remember an old Dell laptop I had having a FW port. When FW400 came out we were on USB1 which was stuck at 12mbps. It wasn’t designed for hard drives and such. It was for floppies, keyboards, mice, printers, barcode scanners, etc. Low bandwidth. Not that that stopped manufacturers. FireWire just wasn’t popular on the PC side outside of video editing (and perhaps other specialized uses). USB got far more useful with USB2, which went to 480mbps, but IIRC you couldn’t achieve that and it had tons of CPU overhead. FW could max out its bandwidth and had low CPU overhead by design despite having a lower theoretical max. But it was over. USB2 was cheaper and FAR FAR more common. FW800 existed for those who needed more bandwidth. But for most people USB2 was plenty and they already had it. Thunderbolt took over for FW, and as of USB4 the two are basically the same (relative to FW vs USB’s differences).
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        Yes, but with limited support. Macs were the only practical option for home video editing back then. iMac DV was released in 1999 with FW400, and iMovie was released at the same time. Media editing seemed like the central use case of Macs through the 2000s.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    It wasn't that short-lived. All DV cameras had FireWire. Although Sony, per its mania for undermining industry standards, created a bastardized version (called I-Link, ugh) whose connector lacked power and required a physical adapter. External FireWire drives (like LaCie's) were popular for quite a long time, since they required no extra power source.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Sony also gave us a professional studio DVCam deck that was SDI based that allowed you to connect to of them to get 4x dubbing speeds. Not once did it ever get used at the studio I was working. Nothing else in the shop used that format, so it was always just realtime SDI work. ahh, sony
      - type0 3y ago
        Speaking of Sony video, they also have Gigabit Video Interface which uses some clever trickery to transmit clean signal in difficult environments like vehicles https://web.archive.org/web/20210513082248/https://www.sony-semicon.co.jp/e/products/lsi/gvif/technology.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210513082248/https://www.sony-...
        dylan604 3y ago
        i closed the tab before looking for a date from when that was released. however, we've been converting video signals to use over Cat5/6 for a really long time since it supports running over much longer distances. can't believe, well, yeah, actually with Sony I can, that they went and made a whole format
      - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        Well, if we're going to review Sony's litany of standards-undermining horseshit, we'd be remiss to omit S/PDIF, which was a bastardization of the existing AES/EBU digital standard. Apparently it differs just enough to make interconnectivity unreliable... creating a pain in the ass for studios the world over. Sony also briefly attempted to undermine Thunderbolt, by issuing a laptop that crammed Thunderbolt connections into a regular USB-A port. I'm sure I'm forgetting (or unaware of) several others. Then there was their ridiculous clinging to MemoryStick for what, a decade after the rest of the world had standardized on SD?
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Apparently it's 1394b is used in some military applications, the F-35 for example.
NavinF 3y ago
> impression that it has been well-known and commonplace for hobbyist and enthusiast PCs for well over 10 years It is. For a long time DP was the only standard that could do variable refresh rate. Even today all high end monitors have DP while the cheapest monitors only have HDMI.
- fireflash38 3y ago
  Which is ironic considering the cost of the HDMI port is likely higher than the DP one due to licensing!
  - dagmx 3y ago
    HDMI is table stakes for most people. DisplayPort is not. So it’s not that HDMI cost being higher but HDMI+DP being higher.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  I just wish TV manufacturers would start putting Displayport into their TVs. GPUs nowadays use 3x Displayport and 1x HDMI, which is quite the bottleneck if you want to max out your ports. As I understand, HDMI <-> Displayport converter cables often do not have the high end features you might want, such as 4k/120Hz HDR, and/or Variable Refresh Rate. Perhaps this has improved in recent months.
MBCook 3y ago
Same. I live in the Mac world. When I took a job where I had to use PCs at work I was surprised to see they were mostly using HDMI with some people using older DVI equipment. I had just assumed everyone had transitioned similar to Macs has years before. Nope. Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  > Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day. I’d wager this is less about HDMI, and more about the fact that people want their old DP-less monitors to work.
  - SamuelAdams 3y ago
    Display port to HDMI cables exist.
    - loup-vaillant 3y ago
      Correct, and the article itself stated the conversion (DP source to HDMI sink) is very easy. Still, I can see laptops choosing the most popular port regardless of the possible conversion. Anecdotally when I go to work the cables I see are mostly HDMI. (This is where I’d love to have a Framework-like laptop, where I could just swap between HDMI and DP output with the relevant output module).
      - nayuki 3y ago
        > Still, I can see laptops choosing the most popular port regardless of the possible conversion. Yeah. It's silly that my old Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (bought in 2012) has a full-size DisplayPort port whereas my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (bought in 2019) has a full-size HDMI port. It's like it's regressing.

hot_gril 3y ago

That, and a similar line might've been said about FireWire, which didn't really make it.

dylan604 3y ago
Maybe I agree with that, but I also know that firewire helped usher in the digital video era. It allowed the transition from tape based acquisition when media cards were prohibitively expensive. Audio/Video/Deck control all down one single cable straight from the camera to the computer was what really kicked the prosumer market into being able to lean closer to pro than consumer. Now that media cards are actually affordable, that does seem like ancient history. I could see how you might think of firewire as a failure if you're looking at it as a USB type transition, but for the camera/video professions, it served a very good purpose even if short lived
- pdmccormick 3y ago
  I once purchased a FireWire multi-channel audio interface with the express intent of reverse engineering the protocol in order to add Linux support. I purchased a specialized PCI card that was intentionally non-standard (not OHCI 1394) but could snoop and capture traffic between a device and a host. I chipped away at deciphering a register map for awhile, but eventually better USB audio devices came along that had more driver support. Still trying to do the same sort of thing though with some audio related USB and Ethernet/IP devices so I guess I never really gave up the idea in my heart!
  - dylan604 3y ago
    you are a glutton for punishment. a hacker after my own heart! i have so many unfinished things where i just knew something could be figured out, only to not succeed. but it sure is fun trying on top of learning new things as well.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    Do the USB devices have comparable round trip latency? That is where USB really hurts and where the Thunderbolt audio interfaces seem to fond their niche today. I'm looking forward to audio interfaces that can do USB4 wrapped PCIe, but for now I live with the latency on Linux.
    - Blackthorn 3y ago
      RTL latency doesn't seem that bad on chips that are built for the purpose, like RME's. Just the off the shelf stuff might be less than ideal. If anything I think a problem is there's just overall too much slop in the whole chain, including the operating system, motherboard, whatever else. It's a little ridiculous that a $50 guitar pedal can easily get better RTL numbers than a $1500 computer system.
      - CameronNemo 3y ago
        Linux has preempt_rt pretty conveniently accessible, and Pipewire has some useful tuning knobs, but my Steinberg UR44 can't seem to keep up.
        nyanpasu64 3y ago
        Are you already aware of the PipeWire batch flags which add additional latency to USB audio devices (dependent on ALSA period rather than quantum)? https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/configuration/alsa.html#alsa-buffer-properties https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/configura...
        3y ago
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Yeah, FireWire was a necessity at the time for certain use cases. Even basic consumer digital camcorders required FW400 to pull onto a PC.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I maybe mis-remembering, but was it possible to add FireWire to an existing PC with an expansion card? I know Thunderbolt was not possible from 3rd party vendors and only the mobo manufacturers could offer a card. I bought one to make a Hackintosh, but then a mobo firmware disabled the card because they didn't want to support it. I seem to recall Firewire being the same way
    - gsich 3y ago
      yes, still is.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Yes it was. Still is. I almost bought a FireWire card so I could use an iPod with Windows before the USB model came out. I also remember an old Dell laptop I had having a FW port. When FW400 came out we were on USB1 which was stuck at 12mbps. It wasn’t designed for hard drives and such. It was for floppies, keyboards, mice, printers, barcode scanners, etc. Low bandwidth. Not that that stopped manufacturers. FireWire just wasn’t popular on the PC side outside of video editing (and perhaps other specialized uses). USB got far more useful with USB2, which went to 480mbps, but IIRC you couldn’t achieve that and it had tons of CPU overhead. FW could max out its bandwidth and had low CPU overhead by design despite having a lower theoretical max. But it was over. USB2 was cheaper and FAR FAR more common. FW800 existed for those who needed more bandwidth. But for most people USB2 was plenty and they already had it. Thunderbolt took over for FW, and as of USB4 the two are basically the same (relative to FW vs USB’s differences).
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Yes, but with limited support. Macs were the only practical option for home video editing back then. iMac DV was released in 1999 with FW400, and iMovie was released at the same time. Media editing seemed like the central use case of Macs through the 2000s.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  It wasn't that short-lived. All DV cameras had FireWire. Although Sony, per its mania for undermining industry standards, created a bastardized version (called I-Link, ugh) whose connector lacked power and required a physical adapter. External FireWire drives (like LaCie's) were popular for quite a long time, since they required no extra power source.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Sony also gave us a professional studio DVCam deck that was SDI based that allowed you to connect to of them to get 4x dubbing speeds. Not once did it ever get used at the studio I was working. Nothing else in the shop used that format, so it was always just realtime SDI work. ahh, sony
    - type0 3y ago
      Speaking of Sony video, they also have Gigabit Video Interface which uses some clever trickery to transmit clean signal in difficult environments like vehicles https://web.archive.org/web/20210513082248/https://www.sony-semicon.co.jp/e/products/lsi/gvif/technology.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210513082248/https://www.sony-...
      - dylan604 3y ago
        i closed the tab before looking for a date from when that was released. however, we've been converting video signals to use over Cat5/6 for a really long time since it supports running over much longer distances. can't believe, well, yeah, actually with Sony I can, that they went and made a whole format
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Well, if we're going to review Sony's litany of standards-undermining horseshit, we'd be remiss to omit S/PDIF, which was a bastardization of the existing AES/EBU digital standard. Apparently it differs just enough to make interconnectivity unreliable... creating a pain in the ass for studios the world over. Sony also briefly attempted to undermine Thunderbolt, by issuing a laptop that crammed Thunderbolt connections into a regular USB-A port. I'm sure I'm forgetting (or unaware of) several others. Then there was their ridiculous clinging to MemoryStick for what, a decade after the rest of the world had standardized on SD?
sillywalk 3y ago
Apparently it's 1394b is used in some military applications, the F-35 for example.

NavinF 3y ago

> impression that it has been well-known and commonplace for hobbyist and enthusiast PCs for well over 10 years It is. For a long time DP was the only standard that could do variable refresh rate. Even today all high end monitors have DP while the cheapest monitors only have HDMI.

fireflash38 3y ago
Which is ironic considering the cost of the HDMI port is likely higher than the DP one due to licensing!
- dagmx 3y ago
  HDMI is table stakes for most people. DisplayPort is not. So it’s not that HDMI cost being higher but HDMI+DP being higher.
bick_nyers 3y ago
I just wish TV manufacturers would start putting Displayport into their TVs. GPUs nowadays use 3x Displayport and 1x HDMI, which is quite the bottleneck if you want to max out your ports. As I understand, HDMI <-> Displayport converter cables often do not have the high end features you might want, such as 4k/120Hz HDR, and/or Variable Refresh Rate. Perhaps this has improved in recent months.

MBCook 3y ago

Same. I live in the Mac world. When I took a job where I had to use PCs at work I was surprised to see they were mostly using HDMI with some people using older DVI equipment. I had just assumed everyone had transitioned similar to Macs has years before. Nope. Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day.

loup-vaillant 3y ago
> Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day. I’d wager this is less about HDMI, and more about the fact that people want their old DP-less monitors to work.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Display port to HDMI cables exist.
  - loup-vaillant 3y ago
    Correct, and the article itself stated the conversion (DP source to HDMI sink) is very easy. Still, I can see laptops choosing the most popular port regardless of the possible conversion. Anecdotally when I go to work the cables I see are mostly HDMI. (This is where I’d love to have a Framework-like laptop, where I could just swap between HDMI and DP output with the relevant output module).
    - nayuki 3y ago
      > Still, I can see laptops choosing the most popular port regardless of the possible conversion. Yeah. It's silly that my old Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (bought in 2012) has a full-size DisplayPort port whereas my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (bought in 2019) has a full-size HDMI port. It's like it's regressing.