Hacker News Reader

Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

This was previously blocked from inclusion in SteamOS by the HDMI forum. It would help the Steam Machine to each 4K120Hz on HDMI.

View on HN

It was blocked from inclusion in the AMD GPU drivers, it's nothing specific to Steam or the Steam Machine.

The HDMI Forum apparently forbids any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. Although I don't know if they ever offered an official justification, for a group that exists to promote HDMI adoption, they're clearly morons.

were*

As the article says, they most likely changed their mind, probably following quite a bit of background discussions and industry influence.

It's a group that exists to make sure that the standard works for all the members, including media companies that think they can control the flow of information. They don't need to promote HDMI adoption since their members already control pretty much all the TV production.

It's still not clear why the standard wouldn't work by AMD having an open source implementation. I try to give the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, it's hard not to agree with the parent comment: whoever came up with this rule and the people who agreed with it are morons.

If memory serves HDMI includes DRM which they don't want people to reverse engineer.

Valve also contributes to the amdgpu driver

Wait "forbids", present tense? How does that track with this announcement that it's coming to the open source AMDGPU?

This is actually a good question … wonder if it’s just api calls to a binary blob haha

Reply on news.ycombinator.com