Comment by mcv
13 hours ago
Why don't TVs support displayport? If HDMI 2.1 support is limited, a TV with displayport sounds like an obvious choice.
I thought audio might be the reason, for as far as I can tell, displayport supports that too.
13 hours ago
Why don't TVs support displayport? If HDMI 2.1 support is limited, a TV with displayport sounds like an obvious choice.
I thought audio might be the reason, for as far as I can tell, displayport supports that too.
Legacy is a bitch.
It took a long time to move from the old component input over to HDMI. The main thing that drove it was the SD to HD change. You needed HDMI to do 1080p (I believe, IDK that component ever supported that high of a resolution).
Moving from HDMI to display port is going to be the same issue. People already have all their favorite HDMI devices plugged in and setup for their TVs.
You need a feature that people want which HDMI isn't or can't provide in order to incentivize a switch.
For example, perhaps display port could offer something like power delivery. That could allow things like media sticks to be solely powered by the TV eliminating some cable management.
The legacy issue is even worse than that. I have a very new Onkyo RZ30 receiver and it is all HDMI with no DisplayPort to be seen. So it is the whole ecosystem including the TV that would need to switch to DP support.
> For example, perhaps display port could offer something like power delivery.
It already does. A guaranteed minimum of 1.65W at 3.3V is to be provided. Until very recently, HDMI only provided a guaranteed minimum of something like 0.25W at 5V.
It's not nothing, but it's also very little to play with.
5W is what I'd think is about the minimum for doing something useful. 25W would actually be usable by a large swath of devices. The raspberry pi 4, for example, has a 10W requirement. Amazon's fire stick has ~5W requirement.
2 replies →
I think it's not really an issue for 95-99% of users who uses devices with non open source drivers so there is no incentive for manufacturers to add it?
Tell Valve that it isn't an issue. They have built in hardware support for HDMI 2.1 on the new Steam Machine but can't support it in software.
> Why don't TVs support displayport?
For the same sorts of reasons that made it so for decades nearly every prebuilt PC shipped with an Intel CPU and Windows preinstalled: dirty backroom dealings. But in this case, the consortium that controls HDMI are the ones doing the dealings, rather than Intel and Microsoft.
"But Displayport doesn't implement the TV-control protocols that I use!", you say. That's totally correct, but DisplayPort has the out-of-band control channel needed to implement that stuff. If there had been any real chance of getting DisplayPort on mainstream TVs, then you'd see those protocols in the DisplayPort standard, too. As it stands now, why bother supporting something that will never, ever get used?
Also, DP -> HDMI active adapters exist. HDR is said to work all the time, and VRR often works, but it depends on the specifics of the display.