That is completely false in 2025. There definitely is bad engagement these days. There's a reason they pulled the advert rather than let it run its course. I don't think anyone here reading this has a sudden urge to go get a BigMac. Simply having a name doesn't make marketing in any way affective or positive.

The problem is it looks like AI slop. It would be a perfectly fine advert if it didn't look like uncanny valley rubbish.

It's more fundamental than that. The problem isn't that they generated AI slop and curated it, that's literally an aspect of creative processes. The real problem is that the final result still looks like AI slop.

Well Netflix makes crappy shows on purpose and by policy directly dictated by the CEO that their movies should be a "second screen" able to be understood by people who aren't watching or paying attention. So I'd go with the scumball. It's an unknown that may be better than the known alternative. No the devil we know will fuck this up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 people suddenly think something not being open source is a violation of antitrust. It's not, this dumb shit has to stop as it distracts from real issues.

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.

There are three things at play here. You only hear people talking about one of them.

1. Several suppliers mean several sources that you need to subscribe to. That is bad.
2. Few suppliers mean zero resistance to astronomical price rises. That has the potential to be much worse.
3. HBO historically had a focus on quality content. Netflix not just historically, but currently as a policy are focusing on forgettable "background" entertainment, or as their CEO calls it "the second screen". Netflix's corporate direction destroying HBO would be a fucking disaster.

The things you describe are not mutually exclusives. Virtually all cameras come with some kind of cloud ability. A great many of them are still none the less completely local, and a subset of those, even those which "require" a cloud may also have an RTSP stream available which you could read out via Homeassistant or some other tool while the camera flashes it's light indicating that you haven't provisioned its cloud connection.