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No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has acce
by jsheard 11mo ago
No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.
Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
- cedws 11mo agoWhy on earth is a connector standard secret?
- TheChaplain 11mo agoHow else will you charge people from implementing support for it?
- pipo234 11mo agoWell, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder. These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders". Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
- littlestymaar 11mo agoThat's obviously less bad, but let's not pretend this is great either.
- pipo234 11mo agoYes, not great indeed. This is why we have av1, ogg, etc. with most of the hard research re-done just to sidestep those pesky patents.
- stephen_g 11mo agoFor now at least - for H.264 AVC, the patents are expired in most countries and most of the final US patents that may apply to AVC High profile will expire in the first half of 2026 [1]. Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2]. 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M... 2. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/brazilian-validity-term-10-years-grant-comes-end-2021-05-24_en https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
- zoeysmithe 11mo agoWhy not? Its not an open standard. This is the rent-seeking behavior you get under for-profit capitalist implementations. This is why we push so hard for open standards.
- 0l 11mo agoUh, the HDMI forum is non-profit
- zoeysmithe 11mo agoProfit/non-profit isn't a big difference. Many non-profits are essentially businesses in practice (money spent/managed, the non-profit just a conduit to the for-profit companies that defacto own it), but just don't issue stock. A non-profit can act like this, and DOES. Non-profits exist in a capitalist context and inherit those norms. Again, this is why we aim for open standards. Also a non-profit is just that, its not a charity. A charity is an entirely other classification and even those are regularly used and abused like this.
- bluGill 11mo agoThere is more than stock required to be non-profit. I suspect technically a non-profit could issue stock, though it is probably not something any would ever try. Non-profit is a business arrangement where making money isn't the goal. There are many different versions of one though: many local clubs are a non-profit and they exist only for the benefit of their members.
- interstice 11mo agoThen why do they have all this?
- crote 11mo agoThat's meaningless, because they delegated licensing to HDMI® Licensing Administrator, Inc. And even if they are somehow a nonprofit: you are also not making any profit when all the money you retrieve via licensing fees is used to pay the royalties of the various patent holders. Nobody cares if the mailing list where they discuss the upcoming specs is managed by a non-profit, the broader HDMI ecosystem is still a massive money grab.
- clhodapp 11mo agoIt's not the connector, it's the communication protocol. It's super lame though. It will be great to watch the downfall of HDMI Forum when their artificial dam against DisplayPort in the living room finally breaks.
- MBCook 11mo agoWhy would display port ever start taking over in the living room?
- bluGill 11mo agoBecause the manufactures don't have to pay a license fee and so once someone start using it everyone will follow and then drop hdmi. However so far nobody has cared enough to be first.
- clhodapp 11mo agoIt's cheaper to implement than HDMI. So if DisplayPort ports are common on displays, devices will start using it (cheapo devices first). If DisplayPort ports are common on devices, displays won't need HDMI anymore. Plus, industry-wide, it's wildly inefficient to have one high-bandwidth video connector for monitors and a different one for TV's when the technical distinction between those is pretty much non-existent and we could scale our engineering effort across a much wider set of devices. So, after a transition period, cost-saving will eventually lead to DisplayPort taking over.
- mschuster91 11mo ago> when the technical distinction between those is pretty much non-existent I think CEC support is still spotty and ARC (audio return channel) isn't supported at all in DP.
- 0x457 11mo agoWell, CEC is a huge mess and barely works[1]. You're right on ARC and eARC. I'd rather DP had a better version of both, but that wouldn't happen. [1]: If you have a stack that works, I'm happy for you, but trust you're just lucky to have a working combination.
- 0x457 11mo agoWe also have a secret json schema for Dolby Vision, idk why are you surprised. This talk is about protocol, but the connector.
- ronsor 11mo agoWhat if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
- asadm 11mo agoyeah I am curious too. Could I legally just reverse engineer that binary and re-implement it?
- EvanAnderson 11mo agoThe typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec. This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack". You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
- nradov 11mo agoIn general to avoid IP legal problems in the USA you can't do all of that yourself. Generally one party has to do all of the reverse engineering and write a specification based on that. Then another party can take that specification and write a "clean room" implementation. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
- robhlt 11mo agoNvidia'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 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
- SahAssar 11mo ago> Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest I'm pretty sure they also moved a lot of stuff to a closed source user-space component, right? This quote from that readme also seems to indicate a required user-space component that I'm pretty sure is not open sourced? > Note that the kernel modules built here must be used with GSP firmware and user-space NVIDIA GPU driver components from a corresponding 590.44.01 driver release
- robhlt 11mo agoThe closed-source user-space component isn't new, the drivers always contained a kernel module and user-space libraries. Those libraries provide an OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. It's equivalent to Mesa for AMD and Intel GPUs (and the kernel driver is equivalent to amdgpu and i915 respectively). Since it's closed we can't really know for sure if anything was moved to it from the kernel, but I think it's quite unlikely something like HDMI link setup was moved to user-space instead of to firmware.
- progbits 11mo agoCan'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.
- embedding-shape 11mo agoJust because something is accessible publicly doesn't mean it's suddenly legal to copy it, same as it isn't OK to go into someone's house just because the door was open. Unless you're police for some weird reasons.
- teamonkey 11mo agoThe problem isn’t that people don’t know how to do it.
- progbits 11mo agoSo what, just the trademark issue for "hdmi 2.1"? Call it a imdh driver then, nobody cares as long as it works.
- foxrider 11mo agoNo, for the resulting open drivers to not be legally dubious the spec can only be obtained by doing a clean-room reverse engineering.
- ndriscoll 11mo agoLegally dubious in what sense? Leaking it might break trade secret protection, but afaik once it's public, it loses that protection, and the only one liable is the leaker. As far as I know, software per se is still not patentable even in the US since the actual source code is abstract mathematics, so it should be fine to publish the source (source code is fundamentally a detailed description of an algorithm, not a system implementing it), and there's effectively no way to stop an end-user from compiling and loading that source themselves. You could also distribute it from a more reasonable country like e.g. VLC does.
- 11mo ago
- thway15269037 11mo agoAnd what if they just do it anyway? What are they going to do, sue them? Make them scrub every git repository on the planet?
- bpavuk 11mo agoit will be easy to prove that it is not technically possible since Git is decentralized. but fines... oh, those fines could be enormous. possibly, AMD could get barred from implementing HDMI at all - all HDMI has to do is to stop selling the spec to AMD specifically.
- blensor 11mo agoWould someone doing a clean room reverse engineering be permissible to then share would they built?
- rf15 11mo agoDepends on the country; US, probably not. Many european countries, probably yes. Asia? Your gov will ask you why you would bother them with a stupid and meaningless question like that in the first place.
- gavinsyancey 11mo agoAnd IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.
- protimewaster 11mo agoHDMI Forum: Working hard to ensure HDMI isn't your first choice
- Aachen 11mo agoI 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