The use case of “make a shit ton of money licensing a proprietary standard” is kind of mutually exclusive with other use cases. It would be hard to cover.

At least one person got the joke.

Pretty sure DRMed content refuses to play on those.

Latency, desync, probably can’t do full 4k/120… just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s a viable solution.

Display port to HDMI cables are pretty good

Their motivation is staying away from open platforms, and protecting their members’ IP rights. Gotta thwart those pirates.

AMD is nearly 100x the size of Valve, and they couldn’t get HDMI 2.1 approval on Linux. Nvidia somewhat has it with their proprietary drivers, but not nouveau.

It’s wild how much we flock around such shitty standards all the time, generation after generation.

My guess is TV compatibility. The steam machine is intended as a living room PC, connected to your TV. Most TVs only have HDMI, no DP.

They’re not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.

Yeah pretty much. Display port is just as good but there aren’t really a lot of TVs on the market with display port because the people who own the HDMI standard are in that industry.

I don’t think you can send audio over DisplayPort

We don’t flock to it, they are forced upon us. Finding TVs that support DP is almost impossible.

One of the biggest problems is that shitty standards use the money they get from licensing the standard to push the standard. Good open standards often don’t have a marketing budget to play with. On top of that, shitty standards can make unrealistic promises to gain an advantage. Like HDMI does with DRM. “If every device uses this standard, piracy will be a thing of the past!”

It exists. It’s Display Port.

‍️ Well ‍️ I ‍️ don’t ‍️ care ‍️

I’m not sure where I got this idea, but I thought it was because Display Port doesn’t carry audio, and a single-cable solution was more appealing.

But apparently Display Port also supports audio, just none of my devices seem to recognize it…?

Apparently the only advantage of HDMI is ARC (Audio Return Channel), allowing devices to send audio back to the video source, which might be useful in some home theater setups.

Active ones aren’t cheap, though.

TBH you should be playing DRM content though smart TV/TV box apps anyway. Desktop Windows playback is more technically limited (for instance, no auto resolution/refresh rate switching) and aside from that you usually get a worse bitrate stream on a stuttery player.

I don’t even know about DRM playback on Linux.

Well Valve should sell an optional DisplayPort adapter then, right?

The Steam Machine is supposed to be plug and play, and not getting VRR on your TV is a huge compromise.

People who connect TVs to the Internet only invite malware. They usually don’t receive big fixes after a few years and tend to spy on all watched content.

Yes, that is what I meant, the ‘we’ used like an alien might observe us.

Theoretically we could stop buying TVs, but practically we are forced into it by supply.

And yes, licencing a standard beyond dev should be just illegal, it hurts (almost) everyone.