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Comment Individuals will lose out (Score 1) 8

This will benefit corporations who will be able to jump through the hoops to register all their works; small authors, photographers, musicians will not benefit. I know several small, independent bands in the UK and have been told that it is not worth the time to register with PPL/PRS yet my folk club needs to pay PPL/PRS an annual fee for use of music - much of which is by these small bands.

Comment Cheap (Score 2) 117

However I suspect it would be a bit more than $10 today.

A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress, that use this synaptic chip)

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 multiple entire frames.

Comment Dongles (Score 1) 117

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 VGA connector on a given port is mainly a convenience. This is so you could reuse wathever cabling is embed in the walls, you don't need to tear down the walls and redo the cabling (which could get expensive in a large conference room). This is also the reason you could find ultra cheap passive VGA-to-HDMI cables on AliExpress/eBay/Amazon for the last segment between the VGA port built into the lectern of some old university lecture room and the laptop outputting the HDMI that the projector is actually configured to fetch from the VGA cabling embed in the walls.

Comment SteamDeck (Score 1) 117

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.

Comment Open source drivers (Score 4, Informative) 117

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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