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.

Funny, I have done it for years at home, I guess I am just confused

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

Nothing is forced on anyone. If people refused to buy them they would be forced to add other ports.

However as someone who considers themselves fairly techy and doesn’t comply with such shitfuckery, I only learned about this last week.

Moving forward I just won’t be buying any TVs at all.

Edit: God fucking forbid any of you actually do anything, or even better, refrain from doing anything, besides bitch and moan on the internet.

That’s great for you, but try to convince one other person who’s not already in your headspace they should not buy any more TVs. That’s almost an impossible ask. Like telling someone not to get an Android or iPhone because of the data collection. Geeks like us can put up with these inconveniences but we’re a very small minority.

People are still going to get the product unless there’s a truly viable alternative available. Until we see a new standard whose goal is to specifically target replacing HDMI in this context, there’s not really any way to suggest people “vote with their wallet” on something as common as HDMI.

I’m not sure why people are so upset.
It’s a little annoying sure, but don’t these work?

The movie studios. As the person above said, the HDMI consortium (owned by movie studios) is focused on protecting their members IP rights from pirates. HDMI has built in DRM, that could be removed from an open source driver.

Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don’t appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.