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tclancylast Wednesday at 5:54 PM1 replyview on HN

Am I understanding correctly that the underlying issue is asking exorbitant prices to see the HDMI Forum’s specs? Feels like you shouldn’t be able to define an industry spec if you want to get paid for it, but maybe that would suppress smaller-scale, niche development.


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jsheardlast Wednesday at 5:56 PM

No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.

Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.

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