HDMI Forum Continues To Block HDMI 2.1 For Linux, Valve Says (heise.de) 127
New submitter emangwiro shares a report: The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve's Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations. In a statement to Ars Technica, a Valve spokesperson confirmed that HDMI 2.1 support is "still a work-in-progress on the software side." "We've been working on trying to unblock things there."
The Steam Machine uses an AMD Ryzen APU with a Radeon graphics unit. Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification. According to Valve, they have validated the HDMI 2.1 hardware under Windows to ensure basic functionality.
The Steam Machine uses an AMD Ryzen APU with a Radeon graphics unit. Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification. According to Valve, they have validated the HDMI 2.1 hardware under Windows to ensure basic functionality.
Sherman act? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Sherman act? (Score:2)
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Open source drivers (Score:5, Informative)
cheaper to just pay the license fee
The problem is that unlike Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Valve isn't selling a closed box with proprietary blob.
Their hardware runs Linux with a close-to-upstream kernel(*).
Among other, they are using the FOSS stack: Linux kernel driver, user space Mesa libraries, etc.
All this is GPL meaning that the code is released (or at least pull requests with the latest are wainting to be eventually upstreamed)
And the HDMI's licencing currently prohibits making that code available (or conversly, GPL means that every body should be able to read and modify the code that does HDMI 2.1 shit even people who haven't paid the license).
(*): except for the dock. The Steam Deck's dock has a dedicated chip that does the USB-C DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, so no need to tweak anything on the drivers running inside the SteamDeck.
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Funny thing - you don't need to license HDMI. You need it if you want to use the logo and advertise it as a HDMI port. But the port connector and such are freely available.
There are tons of devices with "HDMI" ports that aren't certified devices. Maybe you have a few of them plugged in right now without you knowing.
All certification gets you is a few extra things. But it isn't needed to ship a product. You could call it "Digital Video Output Port" or even "HDMI compatible digital port".
Of course, without ce
Re:Open source drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
You're so focused on the concept of certification that you forgot how the license actually works. This isn't about HDMI or not. It's about publishing closed aspects of the spec in open source. Licensing isn't a problem. Valve could ship a binary blob and have full HDMI 2.1 capability. But they want to lean on the open source cred. Good for them, but we're right back to the days of Linux distros shipping without an mp3 decoder library all for the street cred.
Naming it something different doesn't magically allow you to breach the licence agreement by publishing the spec as an open source driver. If you think it does, please have your future posts vetted by a lawyer.
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Sounds like a valid antitrust suit... or would be but for the insane court system which ignores most anticompetitive actions.
There's nothing anti-competitive about this. There's no attempt to monopolize or any other aspect that the Sharman act applies.
It's a closed spec which can't be opened, nothing more. There's literally zero anti-trust related issues here, and Valve could in theory use a closed source binary blob driver for HDMI 2.1. They just don't want to (and I applaud them for it).
I know that Slashdotter's knowledge of antitrust laws in general sucks, but something weird has happened in the past couple of months that peop
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Valve can complain to the European commission, while HDMI group can make money, they can't limit competition and must be open to talk
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Re: Sherman act? (Score:2)
This isn't about a trademark. It's about a patented specification.
Re: Sherman act? (Score:2)
No they did not. This story is about how they didn't. Learn to read, coward.
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I'm not saying that they can't do it, it's that they can't legally do it.
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HDMI was born to DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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...that's not DVI, that's DisplayPort.
DVI is the prequel to HDMI, that single HDMI port on your GPU is also putting out DVI signalling at the lower bitrates. It's also how the various RP2350 "HDMI" boards work, is the DVI protocol is a very simple subset that the early generations of HDMI was built on top of with additional data structures.
HDMI is anti-consumer (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to certify HDMI equipment, and the standards for HDMI were always there to protect IP rights even if it made the devices less reliable and harder to use. End-users just know that sometimes when they bought a new Blu-ray player or settop streamer that it didn't want to work at full resolution with their TV or their A/V switch or the various incompatibilities that exist between revisions.
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Go ahead, there's an analog hole and for the most part the industry doesn't care. With your described setup, you're likely to have a great deal of color loss as the gamut of the screen and your camera are not well matched.
The goal of HDCP is to make it inconvenient for a typical user to make a high quality copy of a video or stream (like pay-per-view sports streaming tends to want higher levels of content protection). Stopping all possible avenues of copying media is not the goal of DCP (Digital Content Pro
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The problem is: the MPA has money and therefor political clout.
Y'know, back in the day of $30 BluRay movies, I could see why the MPA would fight tooth and nail to encrypt HDMI to prevent piracy.
Color me skeptical that's nearly as important as it used to be. When's the last time you bought a BluRay? Since the vast majority of video watching is streaming now, there's so much less incentive to rip and re-distribute movies. Bigger problems are probably people sharing accounts or using VPNs to circumvent geographic restrictions.
Same thing seems to have happened to music. Si
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DRM has nothing to do with it. DisplayPort also has DRM (the same DRM: HDCP) but doesn't have the same restrictions. It's pure licensing bullshit for certain features.
Also what ports you have on your GPU isn't relevant. The only question is what ports you have on your TV, and I'm guessing it's not DisplayPort as HDMI has a feature set specific to your living room that gives it some significant staying power.
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why HDMI? (Score:2)
Re:why HDMI? (Score:5, Informative)
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Because consumers keep buying HDMI, even though it sucks.
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Nothing in the spec stopping an OEM from putting a DP connector on their HDMI sink (TV). It doesn't even have to be HDCP 2.2, but you'd likely want it. And we fall back into the same anti-user trap of DRM. Also the spec won't let you easily add non-HDCP ports to a repeater though, without reducing functionality. And it gets weird if you mix HDMI and DP on the same HDCP compible repeater so I don't think I've seen one on the market. (Repeater spec limitations means A/V switch will have some difficulty)
Not wo
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Everything? Displayport supports sending CEC remote codes between devices? It offers eARC for receivers and speakers? No DisplayPort has provided higher resolution and bandwidth for display. That's it. There's far more to these protocols than simply electrical signalling and the DisplayPort spec lacks some features that are virtually essential in the living room now.
There's a reason no TVs use display port.
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Not, it's a question of not even asked. DP and HDMI were created with fundamentally different purposes. DP hasn't even attempted to implement these features as it was never intended as a protocol for AV systems, it targeted a next generation of PC displays.
Please use displayport (Score:2)
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Steam is such a tiny player in the handheld/console space, I doubt it will move the needle for most TV manufacturers. Certainly Sony would be in no rush to make things easier for them.
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Or hear me out here. It's a computer and already includes both DisplayPort and HDMI ports.
It supports CEC over HDMI making it function like a console allowing TV and audio systems to be powered on/off and input switching.
But you could just use DisplayPort if that's your thing.
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TVs won't use DP as DP lacks many features that are essential to AV systems. E.g. eARC or CDC.
DP -> HDMI can't implement the full feature set (including no VRR meaning display tearing) and introduces latency, precisely the opposite of what you want on gaming console.
At This Point (Score:3)
For home theater, I hate the fact that HDMI couples audio and video together. I understand why other people like that, but for people with advanced setups this is an enormous pain in the ass. If my AV receiver doesn't support the latest HDMI video features, then my only option is to connect the device to the TV and use eARC to send the signal to the receiver. But depending on my TV, certain audio formats aren't supported via eARC. With HDMI, every damned component in the signal chain has to to choose whether or not to support (and pay the requisite licensing fees) for all of the many features offered by the latest versions of HDMI. If I had the option of using separate digital outputs for video and audio, this wouldn't be as much of a problem. I know I'm in a small group of people affected by this, but coupled with the other issues regarding HDMI I'm considering minimizing its use in my house.
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This post may be a troll, but I'll respond in the event that you're serious. At the time that I bought the Playstation 5, it came with HDMI 2.1 which was recently released and I had just purchased a television that supported HDMI 2.1 as well. However, there were no AV receivers for about a year after that which supported HDMI 2.1, let alone contained all of the sonic qualities and other features that I wanted. And that brand new TV didn't support several Dolby
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I ran into this same issue, only when using eARC my sound bar had some of buffer overflow issue that would cause an audio dropout every five minutes or so.
It took about 10 months, but HDMI audio extractors finally came out. That have the single cable from the console and outputs the full signal to the TV, and just the audio to the second output.
The audio EDID flags are pulled from the audio side.
The extractor wants you to connect to the eARC port which I'm not doing. So I lose CEC signals so my TV remote ca
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For home theater, I hate the fact that HDMI couples audio and video together.
It is literally the selling feature for home theatre. Most people hated the fact that early HDMI *didn't* do it. Either you hate it for incompatibilities with your specific equipment or you heat it for reasons that separate you from most of the rest of the AV world.
Perpetuating piracy, then (Score:3)
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This has literally nothing to do with piracy or DRM which literally did not change in the slightest between the 2.0 and 2.1 spec, but ... sure whatever you say.
Leave HDMI behind (Score:2)
Hardware designers should switch to the much more capable Display Port.
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Asking people to learn about Displa
Not HDMI for the future. (Score:3)
What this says to me is that the future must be something open and not HDMI.
Anyway, HDMI is not a forever technology ... soon or later something better will take that place. To stay with a technology controlled by "some" is not a good idea.
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>> soon or later something better will take that place.
I am under the impression that Displayport already did.
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You'd be wrong. There are many features in HDMI that have no equivalent in DP which are virtually essential in the modern AV setup, things like eARC or CDC passthrough.
DP is by far superior on an electrical signalling perspective. But the best tech means nothing if you're unable to use it effectively. At the end of the day, features win out and consumers won't be interested in replacing a couple of HDMI cables for a shitton of separate AV cables.
Actually I don't think there's actually a way to properly impl
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DP has supported the exact same DRM that HDMI has for 19 years now... I think you need to do some reading.
Can't Europe (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't Europe solve this for us? I expect this kind of crap in the US, but Europe tends to lean a little more toward consumers than copyright holders, right?
I wonder if pursuing this in Europe would be more fruitful than doing it here.
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Can't Europe solve this for us? I expect this kind of crap in the US, but Europe tends to lean a little more toward consumers than copyright holders, right?
I wonder if pursuing this in Europe would be more fruitful than doing it here.
I'm not sure what you think Europe is, but it is in no way illegal to have a closed spec over here. Never has been. Hell I remind you the Germans were instrumental in the development of MP3. Look how well the open source community did with that spec, a default Linux install didn't ship with an MP3 decoder for 2 decades.
This is a licensing issue, nothing more nothing less. Europe isn't a magical place where everything is forced to be open source. It's a magical place where cheese tastes good.
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But they could require a DP input on TVs. Once you can expect people to have TVs with a DP input, it'd start to become sensible for devices with HDMI outputs to add a DP output and drop the HDMI one. The EU could do that without touching HDMI's licensing at all.
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But they could require a DP input on TVs. Once you can expect people to have TVs with a DP input, it'd start to become sensible for devices with HDMI outputs to add a DP output and drop the HDMI one. The EU could do that without touching HDMI's licensing at all.
Two questions:
1. Why would the EU mandate a specific standard on TVs? What is the basis? The USB-C mandate was directly linked to e-waste recovery whereas that isn't a problem here. Do you think they care that a couple of gamers can't get a Steamcube working at 61 FPS?
2. Law of unintended consequences, do you realise how many things you've just broken for consumers? Suddenly consumers are left wondering why their TV remote passthrough doesn't work on some of their inputs, or why audio return isn't possible?
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The time has come for a European University CSE department group to reverse-engineer HDMI 2.1 and publish a compatible implementation on Github.
There's a solid history of this category of work going back 30 years.
They have certain legal protections for compatibility and public interest work.
This 1990's licensing model is antiquated and obsolete.
IEEE and ITU have abdicated their responsibility so sombody like Valve needs to do for transport spec what AV1 did for codecs and linux did for operating systems.
"A
Done with HDMI (Score:4, Insightful)
I will be actively seeking out DisplayPort-compatible devices for all future A/V purchases, and will recommend the same for anyone who asks. I have just become a DisplayPort evangelist.
Re:Done with HDMI (Score:4, Informative)
I will be actively seeking out DisplayPort-compatible devices for all future A/V purchases, and will recommend the same for anyone who asks. I have just become a DisplayPort evangelist.
So you're not going to get any new A/V purchases? The reason DisplayPort is virtually non-existent is that it lacks a chunk of livingroom specific features. E.g. eARC, CEC-Passthrough, those are all things you need in your TV to communicate correctly with receivers, speakers, and bluray players (If you're a physical media kinda gal) There's no Displayport alternative. In fact without HDMI it's not possible to route Dolby TrueHD, Atmos, or DTS:X to a receiver as the alternate audio connections don't have the bandwidth for it which would limit your sound options, and that's before you consider the point of ARC in the first place, without it you're back to a million cables between your pieces of equipment and reaching for the remote to change audio and video channels independently.
Displayport is superior for anything video related. But there's a reason it borderline doesn't exist in the A/V world.
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So you're not going to get any new A/V purchases?
If necessary, then yes. I don't see that as a problem. I will also make it know to the sales people that lack of DisplayPort is why I am refusing to buy their stuff.
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Well companies aren't not going to screw up existing compatibility and features just to get one fussy customer. Dp has a long way to go before it becomes viable in the living room, but for that to happen they need to care, ... and they don't. Dp is wholly focused on everything but the living room. Even the future spec is focused on simply chaining multiple displays with more bandwidth rather than implementing feature sets that make it a viable alternative in the living room.
Might have to ... (Score:3)
Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification. According to Valve, they have validated the HDMI 2.1 hardware under Windows to ensure basic functionality.
In my experience, some Linux systems still need binary drivers for stuff like WiFi or cellular. Just hold your nose while you download the Windows driver and load it with NDISWrapper.
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They could just leave that up to consumers. If it's anything like their approach to the Steamdeck then they will release an open and incredibly tweakable platform which the user themselves has root access to do with as they please. I predict that a binary blob driver will be available for HDMI2.1 support on the week of release, just not one provided by Valve themselves.
Another own-goal by the HDMI consortium (Score:2)
Congratulations on making the HDMI interface even more irrelevant compared to Displayport.
Why do they care about this? (Score:2)
My understanding is that if you want to make a HDMI device you need to pay a license fee (covering patents and etc) and that the HDMI people can and will use you if you use HDMI without paying.
And if they control IP rights that allow them to force everyone to pay up, why would this stuff (which isn't even the full spec, just the bits bring done in the driver rather than the firmware or hardware) bring open cause a problem?
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Re: Why do they care about this? (Score:2)
My point is, why does the HDMI licencing mob care if the implementation is open or closed given that they will.get there royalty (or penalties from a court for companies that don't pay) for every port anyway?
There are other standards bodies (Score:3)
Maybe someone could start an IETF RFC for communications protocol for digital video over local wire and fiber that is open.
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It's not a question of other standards bodies. It's a question of capability. The best standard in the world doesn't mean shit if my TV, AV receiver or sound bar doesn't have the input for it. Standards are dime a dozen, and everyone here is already mentioning alternatives, completely forgetting about why they haven't been implemented: living room specific feature sets. There's a reason the same company that produces monitors with display ports produces TVs with HDMI, and it has nothing to do with wanting t
Headline wrong (Score:2)
The proper headline would be "AMD made a very bad choice, and Valve suffers because they choose AMD".
AMD (unlike Nvidia and Intel) choose to not include the protocol enumeration in their firmware (which they apparently plan to do moving forward (they learned the lesson), which required them to do it in software. They knew they would need to make the protocol public, which the license and NDA they signed did not allow. They did try to convince the HDMI forum to let them publish the protocol, which the H
Well, that answers the question I had... (Score:2)
How could that be compatible with competition law (Score:2)
How can that even be legal under competition law? To me that looks like a classic cartel.
https://competition-policy.ec.... [europa.eu]
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There are plenty of dongles around that convert it, I'm kinda surprised they just didn't bundle one rather than add the port directly.
Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/CalDigi... [amazon.com]
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
These adapters don't support VRR. So you get the bandwidth, but not the full feature set of HDMI 2.1
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:4, Insightful)
That dongle says it's not intended for gaming consoles, for good reason. They add latency, as conversion is active and not passive, and they do not support VRR. Nor will they allow HDR at over 60 Hz. At least not any I have found.
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of dongles
I lost you at that word. Please stop pretending that a solution to a problem of fucked specs not being open source is that you need to add a shitty dongle to a product to provide the most obvious base functionality.
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No. And not all consoles needed them. They were a shitty non-solution to a broken standards system back then as well.
Does your comment mean you are so old you've given up on the concept of the human race progressing and thus we have to re-implement long left behind stupid ideas?
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The 'legacy' DP connection on a TV, no.
HDMI ports have inertia but the future is USB-C. The latest USB spec incorporates various bits of Thunderbolt from Intel including support for the Displayport protocol.
That said I haven't been shopping for TVs lately,
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Commercial signage monitors tend to include it, as an example this Sharp PN-M752 has a DP1.4 port built in. [sharpusa.com] Great! Downside is most of these screens are limited to 60Hz so you don't get a ton of benefit over a bog standard HDMI2.0. Oh and they'll be twice the price.
Dongle city is gonna be the best bet for most people. Luckily DP1.4 to HDMI2.1 adapters are pretty available now.
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:5, Interesting)
I fear that most DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongles are not active adapters but instead passive physical connection switches. The HDMI 2.1 electrical signaling is still handled in base computer hardware when the HDMI adapter and a HDMI device is detected. That means that the base computer hardware still needs to know how to do HDMI 2.1 to supply the correct electrical signal. Although to my frustration it has never worked the other way around with a HDMI ports being simply physical convertible to a DisplayPort.
I would really love to see televisions with DisplayPort, but it seems the connector never caught on with consumer devices; the HDMI connector momentum is pretty strong sadly. I wish HDMI would go away all together. Television, GPU, and computer manufacturers just stopped playing with the HDMI Forum. Or maybe at least we will get USBC ports on televisions support DisplayPort as the protocol instead.
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:4, Informative)
I believe the reason for this is due to HDCP cuntery baked into HDMI, but absent from DP. So your home theater equipment including tv's and receivers will not use DP due to hollywood being a gaggle of cunts.
It makes getting proper 5.1 audio on a PC more difficult than need be. Windows doesn't help in this regard either, as the OS for whatever insane reason treats all hdmi connections as a video connection, even if you're just wanting it for audio -- so you wind up with janky phantom displays that never seem to work the way you want.
So your options are hdmi passthrough to a receiver, or an optical connection for lossy DTS.
Re:Use DisplayPort (Score:5, Informative)
I worried it might be a copy protection, but according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], DisplayPort has had HDCP since version 1.1.
However, HDMI had HDCP in 2003, DisplayPort 1.1 did not get it until 2006 and it still was no universal.
In addition audio return (ARC/eARC), remote control via HDMI-CEC, and generally better over longer cable runs give HDMI some advantages in the living room.
Overall it seems HDMI benefit from being first to the living room and carrying that momentum.
Our best hope is that USBC will come for HDMI on the back of the television someday...then we can throw those HDMI cables in the bin with serial, parallel, PS/2, FireWire, proprietary phone chargers, camera connectors...
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>DisplayPort has had HDCP since version 1.1.
Okay, I stand corrected. (Hollywood is still collectively a gaggle of cunts though. I stand by that statement, it's a hill I'll die on.)
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Then you've made a decision based on an entirely faulty premise. Firstly HDMI doesn't need 10 seconds to negotiate HDCP, and secondly DisplayPort needs the same negotiation. DP introduced HDCP in 2 decades ago.
Dongles (Score:2)
I fear that most DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongles are not active adapters but instead passive physical connection switches.
Most, but not all. I litterally have a DisplayProt to HDMI + DVI + VGA combo dongle on my workstation at home.
But they tend to by a tiny bit more expensive (think 10 bucks instead of 1 bucks on AliExpress. Or 50 bucks at your local TV shop), because they require a dedicated chip inside the dongle.
Although to my frustration it has never worked the other way around with a HDMI ports being simply physical convertible to a DisplayPort.
Depends on the device. Can happen in some professional projectors: some enterprise-grade projectors can litteraly support "any protocol over any wiring with enough pins", i.e.: the presence of a HDMI, DP, DVI or VG
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I could see an active DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle with a chip inside that actually converts DisplayPort signals to HDMI 2.1 signals being possible. However I suspect it would be a bit more than $10 today. Worse yet, such a setup would most certainly add latency to an application, gaming, that is sensitive already to any delays. Gaming is what drives the 120Hz and above refresh rates...
Cheap (Score:3)
However I suspect it would be a bit more than $10 today.
A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress [aliexpress.com], that use this synaptic chip [synaptics.com])
Worse yet, such a setup would most certainly add latency to an application, gaming, that is sensitive already to any delays. Gaming is what drives the 120Hz and above refresh rates...
There's no real reason why latency should be more than a couple of "scan-lines" (well, at least the DSC's equivalent horizontal-lines, if the signal needs conversion between compression variants). And there's a big incentive: less on-chip built-in RAM - it's litteraly cheaper to make the chip only keep the most recent relevant data and immediately start streaming out the HDMI 2.1 signal as soon as possible, rather than keeping
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Most, but not all.
Two things: Just because they are active and able to push bandwidth required for high resolutions doesn't mean they support HDMI 2.1 feature sets, in fact they almost universally don't. I've never seen a dongle for instance support for VRR (which is a godsend for gaming on a TV since TVs don't usually support Freesync or Gsync), and also those dongles introduce latency. You may not notice it directly when watching movies since they delay the audio in equal measure but it has a significant affect on visual r
SteamDeck (Score:2)
You can use DisplayPort instead. Is it possible to convert DP to HDMI 2.1?
Yes, that's litteraly how the SteamDeck handles this.
The SteamDeck can output DisplayPort on its USB-C connector (similar to tons of laptops and some smartphones), and the SeamDeck's Dock has a dedicated hardware chip that does the translation into HDMI signal.
This way no need to tweak any support into opensource GPL'd drivers inside the SteamDeck and then risking running afoul of HDMI's licensing restrictions.
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There are TVs with DisplayPort connectors, but they are expensive and sold more as presentation screens for computers.
Please can't someone kill HDMI, it's just causing headaches with no benefits when we have the DisplayPort now.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
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... until the spec is pubic. ...but Valve are not assholes...
Yeah, that would a dick move.
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HDMI forum requires a license so while I bet Valve is able to get a hold of everything technical to make it work I'm thinking they'll risk lawsuit if they just make it work, might be something Chinese companies are less concerned about?
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And I bought a Chinese converter
I've never seen a converter Chinese or otherwise that actually implements the HDMI 2.1 spec completely. There's more to this than just *claimed* bandwidth, and that "more" bit is very critical in gaming setups, e.g. VRR. I've never seen any converter on the market support it.
Re:So, why has nobody reverse engineered it? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a matter of the knowledge not existing, it's that in order to make an HDMI port you need to license a package of patents and agree to them. Random hacker might not care, but Valve, unfortunately, would be sued up the wazoo if it didn't license the package or broke the agreement that goes with it.
A DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle is the way to go, and honestly I'd either put it in the box, or if it's not legal to do that, advise people to order one at the same time, preferably using language along the lines of "to connect your console to a legacy television or monitor that doesn't support DisplayPort, you can buy this adapter here." If the HDMI group is going to impose arbitrary and nasty conditions, encourage people to switch to DisplayPort. It's better anyway.
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A DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle is the way to go
It is absolutely not. Not for a gaming rig. Dongles capable of meeting the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth requirements (active ones) introduce significant latency (you just don't notice this because the sound is also delayed) which appears to act more like input latency than what you're typically used to. Additionally you'll get tearing due to the lack of VRR support since TVs don't use Gsync or Freesync and I've yet to see a single dongle on the market that actually implements that.
You're probably best of just limitin
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That has been done, but the difference between a HDMI splitter soldered together, and being allowed to use the protocol as a mass-market company without getting sued into the ground is a different thing. HDMI is heavily patent encumbered. Ideally we move from it to DisplayPort or something a bit more open, but that doesn't seem to be the case, because almost every TV has HDMI.
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>> because almost every TV has HDMI.
from a quick look only, most also have displayport.
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Fortunately the HDCP association hasn't had much luck suing Aliexpress or any of the vendors there. Not that I have any use for one, but I kind of want to by a $10 HDCP stripper just on general principle.
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