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This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A

This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a clunky mess of hand offs between brittle components.

Forgeties79 1y ago
More failure points means more people throwing up their hands and buying a new one
atoav 1y ago
I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. And don't get me started on DRM/HDCP.. The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector, suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design. Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.
- SpaceNugget 1y ago
  > Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a device where there's something stupid like switching to a different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's fault. I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    > HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people Could I interest you in all the new features you could enable by instead tunneling video over HDMI Ethernet Channel?
    - hedora 1y ago
      Also, why does my 4k display run at 30hz when plugged into my mac? I ruled out the cable, display and laptop by swapping components one at a time.
  - atoav 1y ago
    > That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem. I too could envision a solution that theoretically works perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool – now I have a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain resolutions, etc. I get that more data means higher frequency and that this directly translates to more problems, but nobody (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn't work 100% of the times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic failure.
    - LorenPechtel 1y ago
      I think an awful lot of this could be solved by requiring the ports to export the information they get to the device, and requiring that if the devices can reasonably be able to display the information that they do so. PCs, phones, tablets would all tell you about the cable and the connection. Things without screens and interfaces would not be required to add them, though. It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay for features you don't need, and some features trade off vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find them out or test them.
- jpalawaga 1y ago
  The duty cycle on hdmi connector is like 10k. I imagine probably some of your cables in a lab would actually plausibly hit that without too much issue (then apply standard deviation: some will have broken much earlier, and some won’t quit)
  - atoav 1y ago
    You don't want to know what my headphone extensions (TRSm 3.5 -> TRSf 3.5mm) or my XLR3 cables go through. That is way, way worse than anything the HDMI cables experience, based purey on the look of the cables returned. I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC connectors and coaxial cables..
- specialist 1y ago
  I feel ya. The inability to diagnose cables drives me nuts. Some kind of reportable POST (power-on, self test) should be the norm. On both ends. Grrr...
  - fragmede 1y ago
    If that's a problem you repeatedly run into professionally, you want something like https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4ktest_handheld_4k_hdmi_tester.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4... for hdmi or something like https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 for usb-c
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  HDMI is a piece of shit designed to keep device owners hostage of the spec consortium and manufacturers, and USB-C is a badly brand collection of specs with infinite diversity that shouldn't even work but somehow some times does. But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error correction.
- torginus 1y ago
  > What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, the works. What makes it crap is the absolute flood of cheap garbage HDMI cables/repeaters/KVMs which barely work even at the best of times and shouldn't be even allowed to be solved, as they are out of spec, but online vendors have flooded their stores with this cheap no-name garbage for some reason. Unfortunately, the apparent build quality of the cable, or the price mean nothing when trying to get a working one.
  - atoav 1y ago
    Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
    - bsder 1y ago
      > Strip out the DRM Um, you just hit why HDMI sucks. You have a "default broken" state that is required by the standard. Look, every single interface could have been an evolution of Ethernet (and mostly ARE--HDMI and USB-C are basically enshittified Ethernet). But they weren't because everybody wants to put their fingers in the pie and take out a chunk for profit by being a rent-seeking middleman.
    - zzo38computer 1y ago
- zzo38computer 1y ago
  > What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons). > Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems. SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.
torginus 1y ago
My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test - which instead of having a test strip that changes color based on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and displayed the results on the screen. People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.
- montjoy 1y ago
  Also, when testing for pregnancy you want to be as “sure” as possible and price is assumed to be an indicator of quality.
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  It very well might be superior. I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life, and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English, wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was about at the dividing line.)

Forgeties79 1y ago

More failure points means more people throwing up their hands and buying a new one

atoav 1y ago

I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. And don't get me started on DRM/HDCP.. The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector, suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design. Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.

SpaceNugget 1y ago
> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a device where there's something stupid like switching to a different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's fault. I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  > HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people Could I interest you in all the new features you could enable by instead tunneling video over HDMI Ethernet Channel?
  - hedora 1y ago
    Also, why does my 4k display run at 30hz when plugged into my mac? I ruled out the cable, display and laptop by swapping components one at a time.
- atoav 1y ago
  > That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem. I too could envision a solution that theoretically works perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool – now I have a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain resolutions, etc. I get that more data means higher frequency and that this directly translates to more problems, but nobody (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn't work 100% of the times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic failure.
  - LorenPechtel 1y ago
    I think an awful lot of this could be solved by requiring the ports to export the information they get to the device, and requiring that if the devices can reasonably be able to display the information that they do so. PCs, phones, tablets would all tell you about the cable and the connection. Things without screens and interfaces would not be required to add them, though. It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay for features you don't need, and some features trade off vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find them out or test them.
jpalawaga 1y ago
The duty cycle on hdmi connector is like 10k. I imagine probably some of your cables in a lab would actually plausibly hit that without too much issue (then apply standard deviation: some will have broken much earlier, and some won’t quit)
- atoav 1y ago
  You don't want to know what my headphone extensions (TRSm 3.5 -> TRSf 3.5mm) or my XLR3 cables go through. That is way, way worse than anything the HDMI cables experience, based purey on the look of the cables returned. I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC connectors and coaxial cables..
specialist 1y ago
I feel ya. The inability to diagnose cables drives me nuts. Some kind of reportable POST (power-on, self test) should be the norm. On both ends. Grrr...
- fragmede 1y ago
  If that's a problem you repeatedly run into professionally, you want something like https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4ktest_handheld_4k_hdmi_tester.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4... for hdmi or something like https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 for usb-c
marcosdumay 1y ago
HDMI is a piece of shit designed to keep device owners hostage of the spec consortium and manufacturers, and USB-C is a badly brand collection of specs with infinite diversity that shouldn't even work but somehow some times does. But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error correction.
torginus 1y ago
> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, the works. What makes it crap is the absolute flood of cheap garbage HDMI cables/repeaters/KVMs which barely work even at the best of times and shouldn't be even allowed to be solved, as they are out of spec, but online vendors have flooded their stores with this cheap no-name garbage for some reason. Unfortunately, the apparent build quality of the cable, or the price mean nothing when trying to get a working one.
- atoav 1y ago
  Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
  - bsder 1y ago
    > Strip out the DRM Um, you just hit why HDMI sucks. You have a "default broken" state that is required by the standard. Look, every single interface could have been an evolution of Ethernet (and mostly ARE--HDMI and USB-C are basically enshittified Ethernet). But they weren't because everybody wants to put their fingers in the pie and take out a chunk for profit by being a rent-seeking middleman.
  - zzo38computer 1y ago
zzo38computer 1y ago
> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons). > Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems. SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.

torginus 1y ago

My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test - which instead of having a test strip that changes color based on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and displayed the results on the screen. People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.

montjoy 1y ago
Also, when testing for pregnancy you want to be as “sure” as possible and price is assumed to be an indicator of quality.
LorenPechtel 1y ago
It very well might be superior. I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life, and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English, wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was about at the dividing line.)