It most likely would prevent you from playing anything HDCP. HDCP is illegal (?) to reverse engineer, and there are special versions of HDCP2 specifically for HDMI. You need a license and a verified device for HDCP.

That might not matter much for an ordinary PC, but this Steam Machine will be competing for the living room with the PS5 and Xbox which have Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc; Not sure if things like Spotify are HDCP-protected.

It will be interesting to see how Valve works out the kinks for that. Honestly in general it'll be interesting, because putting those things on Steam Store basically turns Steam Store into a general software store instead of a game store. And the only cross-platform store at that.

With iOS and Android being broken open, you could have games be completely cross-licensed. I'd say other software too, but sadly with everything going the subscription model, you usually already have cross-licensing, in the form of an account.

Part of what you're paying for is the right to use the trademarked tern HDMI, just like how the USB Consortium charges you stupid money to use the USB logo.

The suit over usage of "HDMI" in a reverse engineered version would wind up arguing whether or not HDMI is a genericised term and the HDMI Forum would lose their trademark. They will throw every cent they have into preventing such a decision and it'll get ugly

Yes, that might work. Strictly, HDMI is a registered trademark that might have strings but you could always say something like EIA/CEA-861... compatible instead

It's called nominative use, and describing a thing as "HDMI compatible" is permitted.

One doesn't get to use the logo or even the typeface, but that's not a dealbreaker at all for the purposes being discussed here. Words themselves are OK (and initialisms, such as "HDMI," are just a subset of words like nouns and verbs are).

The wiki has some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

> no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.

In some jurisdictions, yes; however, some would probably still distribute it anyway, on purpose or not. I doubt all of them would get sued either, since lawsuits are expensive and difficult.

From my perspective, the objective is to make enforcement impractical.

> You could certainly try and upstream an infringing implementation into the kernel, but no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.

Isn't that actually a pretty good workaround? Hardware vendor pays for the license, implements the standard, sells the hardware. Linux kernel has a compatible implementation, relying on the first sale doctrine to use the patent license that came with the hardware, and then you could run it on any hardware that has the port (and thereby the license). What's the problem?

Yep, and "HDML" on one device that would obey its user and strip HDCP from the stream when asked.

Yes, that. I think you're only allowed to claim support/compliance if you're certified. And that, allegedly, means they run a couple of closed source tests and involves paperwork and NDAs.

Right. I would just advertise the features not the version number.

My only concern there is the protocol stuff I mentioned.

I think in this case you still couldn't claim it was certified. It would be on users to discover that if they plug an HDMI capable screen into that HDMI shaped port on your widget device, things just work and video shows up as expected

Are there examples where a single person doing it gets successfully sued? It could just be that those companies were extra risk adverse so they came up with monetarily inefficient ways to defend themselves.

I've been thinking about this recently. What if one of the parties is an LLM?

So... I ask Gemini to write a technical spec and Claude Code to implement it?

Basically a week-end project...

I used to remember the lyrics to the 09 F9 song.

I think you misread the comment. Each person's AI agent breaks the standard once. He was not claiming they would work together. And even if he the act of translating and understanding large sums of text (binary data) seems easier to divide and concor than open ended problems like cold fusion or unifying quantum physics and general relativity.

I know that HN replies must carry some substance, unlike majority of Reddit comments. But I wanted to say that this comment read line a poem to me.

What would you expect from z'ers growing up under closed magical shells doing everything for themselves (smartphone and tablet OSes) and later being utterly lost with the basics of IT.

Wow, full on delusional about how engineering work scales. Can't save everyone from themselves...

Great, now my face hurts from laughing.

HDMI Forum don't like TV SOC boards that have both kinds of ports and discourage them from being made.

Also, HDMI Forum don't like converter boards that support every advanced feature at once (Variable Refresh Rate, HDR, etc.) and won't license them.

DisplayPort and HDMI kind of leapfrog each other in terms of technical superiority, so neither is definitively technically superior in the long term.

Mass-market compatibility.

It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.

The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.

Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.

So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.

Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.

Apparently, the Hisense U8QG has DP-over-USB-C support. This might be the Trojan horse for DP in the living room.

Many TV manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum...

https://hdmiforum.org/members/

DRM, I believe

That's done by the PHY layer, there's no need to implement that in software.

GPMI isn't an open standard and it doesn't support HDCP. It might end up being very popular in China but it will be a hard sell in markets that aren't primarily consuming Chinese media.

It'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.

Because 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.

USB C is at least one reason that will apply constant pressure.

Well, if this were a free market, b/c there would be demand for it? I want a more standardized protocol so I need less cabling and connectors, and I want features like 4k that HDMI effectively (see TFA) does not support.

I would vote with my wallet … if I could.

Like, why do we need two connectors, for the same thing? DP is clearly technically superior.

Of course, there's a wide range of issues: there's a number of comments on this article stating how the HDMI forum is manipulating the market (e.g., by suppressing competitor connectors on the board, offering lower royalties for bugs, suppressing specifications), and then there's just getting out-competed by the litany of consumers who have no idea and do not care to know what they are buying, and marketplaces like Amazon that promote mystery-meat wares.

For 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_M...

2. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...

That's obviously less bad, but let's not pretend this is great either.

That'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.

Then why do they have all this?

Profit/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.