I do not really have a body for this. I was not aware that this is a thing and still feel like this is bs, but maybe there is an actual explanation for HDMI Forum’s decision that I am missing.
I do not really have a body for this. I was not aware that this is a thing and still feel like this is bs, but maybe there is an actual explanation for HDMI Forum’s decision that I am missing.
HDMI has never been an open standard (to the best of my understanding anyway). You’ve always needed to be an adopter or a member of HDMI forum to get the latest (or future) specs. So it’s not like they’ve just rejected a new idea. The rejection is fully consistent with their entire history of keeping the latest versions on lockdown.
Standards organizations like HDMI Forum look like a monolith from the outside (like “they should explain their thinking here”) but really they are loosely coupled amalgamations of hundreds of companies, all of whom are working hard to make sure that (a) their patents are (and remain) essential, and that (b) nothing mandatory in a new version of the standard threatens their business. Think of it more like the UN General Assembly than a unified group of participants. Their likely isn’t a unified thinking other than that many Forum members are also participants in the patent licensing pool, so giving away something for which they collect royalties is just not a normal thought. Like… they’re not gonna give something away without getting something in return.
I was a member of HDMI Forum for a brief while. Standards bodies like tihs are a bit of a weird world where motivations are often quite opaque.
Thanks for sharing these insights.
Okay not publishing the spec is still the same, but something else is new nonetheless.
AMD is an adopter*, they have the spec and they implemented a driver for 2.1 intended to be open sourced in Linux. But they were still blocked from publishing it. For HDMI 1.4 that wasn’t an issue yet from what I’ve found (though it’s always hard to search for non-existence). Open source implementations of HDMI 1.4, even in hardware description languages, seem to exist.
*you can search for “ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES” here to confirm for yourself
Translation: Nothing’s happening until someone needs to get bribed.
/s
Is this really your point or are you being sarcastic? Pick one
You want companies to stop supporting and using your shitty standard? Because that is how you get customers ntonstop using your standard and by extension, your companies