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.

I’m not sure what that has to do with what I said. This is about corporations asking consumers to bend over and get fucked, and consumers as a whole repeatedly lining up to take it.

BFGs with display port do exist as a viable replacement for a TV, but they’re expensive and kinda niche.

They’re not lining up to take it though. It’s all they’re given. When HDMI was new, most people skipped component cables entirely and went straight from 480i analog to 720p digital overnight and the only way to do that at the time was HDMI. Years and years later, we still only have HDMI and DP as the two standards and they’re not putting the alternative on TVs.

The consumer does have the responsibility to make the choice, but only when those choices are actually presented to them. If there were DP TVs as available options, I’d agree with your point, but I’m not about to ask my friends to boycott HDMI TVs anytime soon because I know all it will do is inconvenience them and it won’t make a lick of difference in the market.

They’re not lining up to take it though

They are though.

It’s all they’re given

Then they can choose not to buy anything, or to buy a computer monitor.

it won’t make a lick of difference in the market.

This is the defeatist mentality that keeps them so successful.

Sincerely! As someone who dislikes DisplayPort, moves like that makes me want to use it over HDMI.

Gather ‘round the 27” gaming monitor for the big game this weekend at my place!

Okay sure

No one is saying it’s great. But that’s the point. You have to choose between convenience and getting fucked. And overwhelmingly people will choose the former. And that’s what they’re counting on.

Choose the latter and those stupid fucking companies are forced to bend to your will and then you can buy whatever fuckin TV you want.

This ethical position is such crap in the modern era and if you take it you simply aren’t going to be contributing to this conversation much longer. Unless you go full stallman and get a specific laptop from 15 years ago with very specific hardware that you can flash and install very specific software onto it you have to make peace with the fact that as a modern consumer the landscape has fucked you.

Your choices are to moderate how fucked yoh get in terms of anticonsumer bullshit because the market is stacked against you and the illusion of choice is always there. HDMI is a great example, smartphone platforms outside of android and ios is another. Are their options outside of these walled gardens? Technically but they’re generally much worse and often cost more than a comparable model.

It’s just you can refuse to buy an iphone, you can refuse to buy an android, but you can’t really refuse to buy a smartphone in the modern era. You can refuse to buy a tv but you can’t really refuse to buy a display of some kind. You might think you beat the system if you just get a laptop or computer monitor I guess but not really, monitors increasingly don’t have DP and frankly the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway. Consumers are idiots who will continually vote to fuck themselves. We need regulatory oversight.

Then watch on a plug-in Android TV box. Or take to the high seas.

I’m just saying, if you’re going to stream from an internet service anyway, video/audio on every HTPC streaming app I’ve tried looks bad. Netflix is the best, and it’s still heavily compromised. And (at least on my Sony), the local Android apps tend to have the best system integration for rescaling, HDR, setting the correct refresh rate, per app IQ settings and so on.

But that obviously doesn’t apply if you’re hosting it locally though Kodi, Jellyfin, Plex or whatever.

Hmm, that’s a new one for me. Why the dislike for DisplayPort?

the whole “vote with your wallet” thing is stupid anyway

Voting with your wallet is literally the only way things will ever improve.

This explains so much why actual voting numbers are so poor in the US…

Now if you could just convince the rest of the country to not have a TV in every room of their houses.

Well, apparently in your opinion, money is the only way to have effective change in the world. Any other attempt to do so will fail miserably.

See how well that has worked over the past 40 years? I mean don’t buy shit you don’t support obviously but don’t expect a personal boycott or even advocating heavily for others to the same to have any kind of impact whatsoever.

It’s because the average consumer is dumb but this isn’t an indictment of the average consumer, necessarily. The average consumer doesn’t want to have to do research on every fucking thing they buy to find out the nefarious bullshit about it. Oh the tv doesn’t support open connection standards, oh my phone is a walled garden built for data collection, oh this smart lightbulb is a privacy nightmare with bullshit tos and also has security issues, etc. They just want to go on amazon or to home depot or whatever and buy shit that looks like it will do what they need for a price point they can afford.

That’s where regulatory oversight comes in: given the above and a consistent lack of consumer ability to enforce standards we need political oversight to pick up the slack. This is a unified arm where a consumer frustration can turn into action much more quickly, even if sales continue because of market fuckery (eg tvs still selling because you can only buy hdmi TVs). But unfortunately we live in a country where the tech industry has performed a near and total regulatory capture and has no fear that regulatory oversight will ever occur, and they’re probably right, at least for now.

So you’re wrong that it’s the only way, and I would argue it’s the most ineffective and inefficient way. It just feels like it’s the only way because of our failed state political situation where even a regulatory concern that should be a slam dunk like right to repair often either fails or only passes in a greatly neutered state because the local politicians thought Microsoft and Apple made some great points about preventing local jobs so that tech billionaires could continue to make even more money

You should literally never use the apps built in to your TV. Unless you just really like letting the TV manufacturer know exactly what you are watching and when.

On Linux you check the box in Firefox that says Allow DRM Content and then yes, as far as I know, you need to be using laptop or a HDMI display.

The only way? Literally?