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bee_rider12/10/20255 repliesview on HN

What is the dam against DisplayPort anyway? I never see it on TVs for whatever reason.

Actually it’s a bit odd, in my mind DisplayPort is highly associated with quality. But I don’t actually know if it is the superior connector or if it just seems that way because monitors are usually better than TVs in every metric other than size and brightness.


Replies

clhodapp12/10/2025

HDMI Forum don't like TV SOC boards that have both kinds of ports and discourage them from being made.

Also, HDMI Forum don't like converter boards that support every advanced feature at once (Variable Refresh Rate, HDR, etc.) and won't license them.

DisplayPort and HDMI kind of leapfrog each other in terms of technical superiority, so neither is definitively technically superior in the long term.

danudey12/10/2025

Mass-market compatibility.

It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.

The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.

Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.

So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.

Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.

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xattt12/10/2025

Apparently, the Hisense U8QG has DP-over-USB-C support. This might be the Trojan horse for DP in the living room.

preisschild12/10/2025

Many TV manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum...

https://hdmiforum.org/members/

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fullstop12/10/2025

DRM, I believe

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