Not to mention, DisplayPort is the superior standard over HDMI in both technological terms as well as it being royalty free.

Yes and no. HDMI CEC works pretty decent these days, all the kinks have been worked out over the years and the only time it bugs out is if you use Chinese brands (looking at you, TCL) that write horrid firmware and never fix any bugs found after release.

Displayport has DDC/CI, which allows you to adjust things like brightness, volume, etc. remotely. This has existed since the DVI era (!) which means Displayport has a huge headstart. But they never formalized and enforced the DDC/CI spec, which means every monitor has extremely weird quirks. Some will allow you to send and read data. Some will only allow you to send data and crash when you try to read. Some will update only once every few seconds.

Although in this specific case, one wonders why Valve didn't just use two Displayport 1.4 ports and and stuck an onboard HDMI converter in front of one of them, sourced from a company that would be amenable to having Valve work on the firmware of said converter. Make the entire firmware of the converter open source except for the binary blob that handles the Displayport 1.4 -> HDMI 2.1 bits.

Hopefully Valve does this but sells it as a external, high quality converter. It would be a nice little plus even for non-Steam Machine owners, same way like Apple's USB-C to 3.5mm convertor is the highest quality mini DAC on the market for the low price of €10.

> HDMI CEC works pretty decent these days, all the kinks have been worked out over the years and the only time it bugs out is if you use Chinese brands

I don't know. I have an LG TV and it does not support turning the display on/off with HDMI CEC. Everything else seems to work but it intentionally ignores those commands.

Have you turned off SIMPLINK? (LG's older name for CEC).

Option 1 (Hidden Menu Method)

* Press the Mute button repeatedly until the hidden menu appears; ensure Auto Power Sync is enabled.

* Go to General → Devices → TV Management and disable Quick Start+.

* Go to General → System → Additional Settings → Home Settings and turn off both options.

Option 2 (Settings Menu Method, webOS)

* Press Settings on the remote and open All Settings.

* Navigate to General → Devices.

* Turn SIMPLINK (HDMI-CEC) ON. (webOS 6.0+, enabling SIMPLINK automatically enables external device control).

No, it is enabled. Other CEC commands like changing the active input work.

[Older] LG TVs do not implement CEC Standby command. You need a hardware mod: https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec/issues/363#issuecommen...

That's too bad. It's only about five years old now. Old but not unreasonably old.

Brightness control on external monitors has never been supported in Windows though, partially due to issues with displays that have poor write endurance on internal storage.

Monitor brightness is controlled over CEC which is just i2c. Windows most certainly supports this on an OS level.

Yes, I've used this in the past:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/highleve...

I change brightness all the time with a little tool called Monitorian.

It might not be an "internal windows" tool, but I have controlled an ancient monitor (I think over VGA?) using a 3rd part app on windows. The buttons had broken, but software control worked just fine.

Funny enough... HDMI CEC is still not perfect in my experience. For the longest time, if I powered on my Mac mini and not power on the TV manually, it would actually cause the TV to crash and force a reboot. It was really strange behavior.

Is there any reason CEC can't be implemented over DisplayPort?

There shouldn't be. DP already is a half-duplex, bidirectional AUX channel running at 1 Mbps.

As long as you are okay with a 1-3m long cable.

Unfortunately, for longer runs, DisplayPory is kind of a nightmare. HDMI tends to "just work" as long as you use fiber optic construction.

nothing stops cable makers from making the same for DP

In fact I’ve used a 100 foot fiber optic DisplayPort cable that I “just bought” on Amazon, admittedly for a LOT of money (like, I think it was about $100 USD, 3 years ago or so).

That's not actually such a bad price. I didn't know they even made these - cool!

Huh, I thought I had mine earlier. Mine was from May 2021. They were very very new and had very few reviews, and it was $56. For a 100' fiber optic cable that promised 8k60 and was light.

This cable is absurdly long. I have no idea how to coil it nicely. At my last place I had three stories, and would sometimes just dangle most of it down to the ground then wind it up from the roof.

I just wish they sold the transceivers separately from the fiber. Being able to use any random length of cheap off-the-shelf SMF/MMF fiber would be so much more convenient than having to get a custom one-off cable.

They exist for medium-speed HDMI (see for example [0]), but I haven't seen them for modern high-speed DP yet.

https://www.amazon.com/Converter-Extender-Transceiver-module...

You say it's a LOT, but it's about the same cost as a much much shorter USB 4.0 cable. (Granted, it also has to be able to carry 240W.)

I hate noise from the PC, so I've sited my PC under the desk at the opposite end of the room to where I sit (so about 3.5m away). I have a pair of 5m DP cables running to my 2 ultrawide monitors without any problems at all, so it seems if you buy decent cables it just works with DP too.

The only potential issue is that they seem to be slow waking up from sleep. I've never been interested enough to investigate if moving the PC closer with shorter cables fixes that, or whether it's just an issue with having 2 monitors. I think the underlying cause is actually just because it's Windows and that one monitor (they're supposed to be identical) seems to wake up earlier than the other, so it briefly flashes on, then goes black while it reconfigures for 2 screens and then on again.

But anyway, my 5m cable runs seem fine. They weren't especially expensive nor especially cheap cables, IIRC around 10-15 GBP each.

TFA says that AMD has a working 2.1 driver, but the hdmi forum goons rejected it.

Maybe one day I can pirate an HDMI driver

You wouldn't pirate a car, why would you pirate a driver!

> You wouldn't pirate a car, why would you pirate a driver!

I wouldn't steal a car, but I would copy one or download one from the internet and 3D-print it.

Yea, IMO piracy is a misnomer. To steal something (or Pirate) you would have to take something which causes the original to disappear from the owner.

But Piracy isnt that, you create an unlawful copy, but you didnt steal (IMO)

Which is why i cant participate in the "Is AdBlocker Piracy" debate, because for me, not even piracy is piracy :P

one day you wont have to

If they have a working driver since 2 years ago, couldn't they just release it to the community? I imagine most gamers would typically be capable/ok with that.

So just drop off a patch somewhere by "accident" and have someone else merge it. What are they gonna do?

Are they rejecting the driver because of it being open source? There are specific modules I use in my AMD card that require closed proprietary driver add-ons for example such as AMF.

Not defending the HDMI forum here, but perhaps Valve / AMD have a way of including a proprietary blob in SteamOS (I don't think most gamers would care)

>Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification.

Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.

I'm switching to DisplayPort

That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort is a massive reason I think they deserve to have their building surrounded by angry people with pitchforks and torches. Anti-competitive abusers, doing awful things to prevent a better world.

DisplayPort actually makes sense as a digital protocol, where-as HDMI inherits all the insane baggage of the analog past & just sucks. HDMI is so awful.

Oh wow, that explains a lot, I sort of always figured it was just market momentum that meant you never see tv's with a display port. sort of like

... we need a digital video link

VESA develops DVI

... market gap for tv's identified

hdmif develops HDMI which is DVI with an audio channel

... while technically a minor feature that audio link was the killer feature for digital tv's and led to hdmi being the popular choice for tv's

VESA develops displayport a packet(vs streaming for DVI and hdmi) based digital link, it's packet nature allows for several interesting features including sending audio, and multiple screens.

... no tv's use it, while display port is better than hdmi it is not better enough to make a difference to the end user and so hdmi remains normal for tv's, you can find a few computer monitor with DP but you have to seek them out.

I will have to see if there is some sort of stupid "additional licensing cost" if a tv is produced with displayport, that would explain so much. I don't claim that there are no tv's with DP but I certainly have never seen one.

> That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort

Wait what?! This would be jaw-dropping anticompetitive behavior. Could you source this statement?

No, they don't put DP on because every $ of hardware they fit to the TV needs to provide value. DP requires a large board component that may need manual handling, circuit traces (+ decoupling) and silicon on the chip to interface. It then requires software support in the stack and that needs testing/validation.

The percentage of people who will actually use DP to connect their TV vs HDMI is tiny. Even people who do have DisplayPort on their monitors will often times connect it with HDMI just because it's the more familiar connector. I spent a decade working in that area and we literally were debating about spending cents on devices that retailed for hundreds, or thousands. The secondary problem that drives that is that ~90% of TVs sold use the same family of chips from MStar, so even if you wanted to go off-track and make something special, you can only do it from off-the-shelf silicon unless you pay a fortune for your own spin of the silicon. If you want to do that then you better commit to buying >1m chips or they won't get out of bed.

HDMI forum was founded by mostly TV manufacturers, they're not interested in constraining the market in that way. It's all just been market consolidation and making TVs cheaper through tighter integration.

I'd rather buy a 65-75" computer monitor and put it in my living room.

I just don't care about the other things in a TV - I don't want smarts, I don't want speakers, I no longer need a tuner.

The pixel density, among other things, are very different between a TV and a Monitor. This is why a monitor of similar size will be vastly more expensive than a TV - they're optimized for different viewing experiences/use-cases.

For a simple example, a TV usually assumes the viewer isn't sitting just inches away from it...

There are differences but man you for sure picked the most incorrect one - 4K say 42" OLED TV and same dimension PC gaming screen have exactly same pixel density, there is no subspace magic.

I have a 4k 42" OLED Phillips Evnia monitor on my desk.

If they sold a 4k 65-75" version of it, I'd buy it in a flash.

https://www.philips.co.uk/c-p/42M2N8900_00/evnia-gaming-moni...

I'm not a gamer, so honest question: what is PITA with HDMI for gamers?

Before HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort already supports high refresh rates (greater than 120Hz) at high resolutions. Also many high-end PC graphics cards offer more DisplayPort ports than HDMI.

I think most graphics cards nowadays come with roughtly 3 DP ports and 1 HDMI port. It might be different for things like the Multi-media cards that are on the low-low end of the spectrum (think of GT 730 level in a generation) might have more HDMI ports since they are more intended for such an audience.

Well HDMI is better than all the standards I used before it. Never did something with DisplayPort but for what I can tell it's Apple related (right?). I used DVI-I, DVI-D, VGA, and even old stuff in the past.

There is the vesa standards organization with a pretty good history of successful display connections standards vga(analog video) dvi(digital video) and displayport(packet video) and very little drama affecting the end user with how the connection is used.

Contrast this with the hdmi consortium which put together the hdmi standard. originally hdmi was just dvi with a built in audio channel. and while I will concede that the audio channel was a killer feature and resulted in the huge success of hdmi. They really did very little technical work and what work they did do was end user hostile (hdcp rights management)

It really is too bad that display-port is sort of relegated to computer monitors as it is better designed and less end user hostile than hdmi. but hdmi with it's built in audio channel won the market for digital video connections and by the time display port was out people were, understandably, reluctant to switch again. While display port is better, it is not enough better to be for the end user to care.

Have you even bothered reading any discussion here? I can't downvote you but its easy to see why others did so, a very lazy and clueless comment about very basic of tech everybody uses, on Hacker news. You can for sure do better.