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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Aliexpress sells things that claim to terminate hdcp and forward hdmi. Caveat emptor.

I find it crazy that the signal between our monitors and desktop computers is encrypted when these exist.

What's even crazier is that we get the negative of DRM but none of the upside. I have a 4k hdmi 2.0 TV without hdcp 2, so no 4k content without the "splitter". Also any interoperability issue is a "catastrophic" failure (as in at best no content, at worst no hdmi output at all). And yes they do happen, either because of broken software implementation (some TV don't reset their hdcp state machine when switching hdmi source), or just dumb electrical issue (i2c - and cec - have a habit of dying because of leaking charges, and one needs to unplug everything for 10 min to fix it)

That's video DRM for you.

Upside? There is no, and never was, an upside. Not for the user, and not for anyone else. Video DRM literally never worked.

Nonetheless, it exists, and it makes things worse for everyone by existing.

I even occasionally get audio issues on Netflix (AppleTV plugged into Samsung 4k oled tv), which I assume are due to some kind of DRM, though never dug into it. Sometimes when switching inputs (firetv stick / AppleTV stick), or switching content on AppleTV between different apps, the Netflix content audio just stops working. All app UI sounds work correctly, but no audio once you hit play. Toggling the AppleTV audio settings a few times between dolbyAtmos and standard stereo usually brings it back, so I assume it has something to do drm on the audio tracks, but if anyone has other ideas lmk

I used to run into this often with Paramount+. I don't know if it's still an issue or not because I cancelled over it (plus them showing me ads when I pay for premium).

When I worked in music streaming I made these arguments all the time. The labels would agree with us wholeheartedly about how shitty DRM was but said they demanded it because the artists demanded they do "something" to stop the copying.

https://youtu.be/z8K08AcVru0?t=627

I assume it has an upside for whoever invented it since they can sell it to everyone

This is how the world works. If you want to get rich, you can sell something that doesn't work, to rich people who believe it does. That's basically how YCombinator works.

The only direct upside to DRM is for the IP owner.

Yes though for monitors displayport is better anyway and it doesn't do hdcp.

DisplayPort has supported HDCP (as well as its own DRM scheme DPCP) since version 1.1.

I agree that DisplayPort was better for monitors, but HDMI has basically become DisplayPort so these days they're more or less two sides of the same coin. Both use data packets over fixed rate links now.

You may be thinking of HDMI vs DisplayPort over USB-C, because otherwise they couldn't be more different. In any case, HDMI is still heavily patent and royalty encumbered, to the point it is going to be difficult for opensource GPU drivers to support native HDMI 2.1 or higher going on, while DisplayPort is still royalty free.

The situation is so bad Intel has pretty much skipped native HDMI ports in recent chipset graphics to focus on DP only (motherboards can still install off the shelf DP->HDMI converters), while on AMD the newer HDMI features won't be supported at all on Linux.

> You may be thinking of HDMI vs DisplayPort over USB-C, because otherwise they couldn't be more different.

No, I'm referring to how HDMI 2.1 changed basically everything but the connector to become a multi-lane packet based protocol like DisplayPort instead of being a direct descendant of DVI, which itself was basically digital VGA.

I realize the licensing situation is a disaster.

yep, I'm running an hdmi to dp converter to make linux work.

There are others that end up doing the same thing - I believe some of the Decimators do - perhaps this?

https://www.decimator.com/Products/MiniConverters/12G-CROSS/...

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