HDMI Forum Closing Public Specification Access Is Hurting Open-Source GPU Drivers

[cb88]

The answer is obvious... let HDMI die already.

[oiaohm]

Allowed by the spec, yes. Can be found in a single piece of manufactured hardware, no.
I don't think there was ever even a chip designed let alone tested with ethernet capability.

Currently manufactured hardware the answer is no. There are some insanely rare devices that were manufactured.

https://www.jaycar.com.au/4-input-hdmi-switcher-with-audio-return-and-ethernet/p/AC1619

Like this one. The new replacements does not have the feature.

Thanks for the clarification.

https://www.bluecinetech.co.uk/hdmi-cable-with-ethernet/

This covers why its dead functionally dead in "HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) and HEC" Bit they both use the same HDMI pins so you can only have ARC or HEC pick one. Think TV wants to drive a sound bar guess what it has to have ARC.

If you happen to have one of the rare device sets where you can use Ethernet over HDMI you find out its not exactly the best idea to plug Ethernet cable into them. Its not just performance of 100Mps being slow a lot of those hdmi switcher boxes did not implement a Ethernet switch either they implemented a Ethernet hub including that AC1619.

Most people will be too young to know the big difference in performance between using a ethernet hub vs switch.

Also you get nice stall outs because a lot of the early HEC chipsets were not great so you could have video signal cutting if heavy network traffic happened and worse you could have everything with the same testing MAC address. Why the vendor did not pay for a MAC address for a screen without a Ethernet port.

I would say you don't want to find old HDMI hardware with Ethernet capability generally but they did exist and they were horrible.

[f0rmat]

Currently manufactured hardware the answer is no. There are some insanely rare devices that were manufactured.

https://www.jaycar.com.au/4-input-hdmi-switcher-with-audio-return-and-ethernet/p/AC1619

Like this one. The new replacements does not have the feature.

https://www.bluecinetech.co.uk/hdmi-cable-with-ethernet/

This covers why its dead functionally dead in "HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) and HEC" Bit they both use the same HDMI pins so you can only have ARC or HEC pick one. Think TV wants to drive a sound bar guess what it has to have ARC.

If you happen to have one of the rare device sets where you can use Ethernet over HDMI you find out its not exactly the best idea to plug Ethernet cable into them. Its not just performance of 100Mps being slow a lot of those hdmi switcher boxes did not implement a Ethernet switch either they implemented a Ethernet hub including that AC1619.

Most people will be too young to know the big difference in performance between using a ethernet hub vs switch.

Also you get nice stall outs because a lot of the early HEC chipsets were not great so you could have video signal cutting if heavy network traffic happened and worse you could have everything with the same testing MAC address. Why the vendor did not pay for a MAC address for a screen without a Ethernet port.

I would say you don't want to find old HDMI hardware with Ethernet capability generally but they did exist and they were horrible.

Thanks for the further information.

And I am old enough to know the difference between a hub and a switch. The first computer I programmed on was a TRS-80 and the first modem I used was a 300 baud dial-up.

[MadeUpName]

Thinking about the AMD drivers for example. Those are mostly written by AMD and there is no way AMD doesn't have access to the HDMI spec or there would be no HDMI ports on their cards. I like HDMI but I can drop it if they go full retard.

[qarium]

Who was the A22holes lobbying for this?
I want to know, to not accidentally buy their products.

it is very simple search the company who is the only one who only has closed source drivers....

Nvidia ... Nvidia is the only company who profit on this.

[edwaleni]

No wonder I saw a t-shirt in the airport that said #freehdmi

[xcom]

For PC monitors HDMI shouldn't be needed. Normal DVI or displayport should be enough.

[sbolokanov]

Note to future self: buy only hardware that is not based upon HDMI

[Guest]

Well this only prevents AMD/Intel from implementing the HDMI 2.1 VRR spec. AMD Freesync on HDMI for versions older than 2.1 is some proprietary thing they made up, and isn't affected by this, so..........

[Guest]

And what about samsung, lg and other TV makers. they use linux kernel and base on the license they need to make linux kernel publicly available. So if they add something new from HDMI spec they can't make it public and linux kernel license request them to do that.

Not unless they implement some shim driver in the kernel, and implement actual HDMI spec in the userspace. They then release the kernel with the shim driver under GPL as required.

Remember that if they don't upstream/mainline, they don't have to follow proper kernel development rules.