So basically HDMI and DP should be combined to be the best standard and maybe half the licensing fee and it would be great for everyone involved, am I correct?
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Mini DisplayPort to Be Adopted as Part of Official Spec
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Well, HDMI has a royalty fee, DP doesn't (AFAIK). Those pennies add up quick when you ship a few million units of it.
I don't see the PC guys combining efforts with the HDMI folks when the PC guys want cheap with dual-link DVI bandwidth, while the HDMI folks want royalties and 'good enough' resolution for HDTVs while pushing the color gamut deeper.
Not really. The more you sell, the less it matters. It doesn't become progressively more burdensome simply because you build more. They could save over a dollar per unit in smarter packaging if they were actually concerned about cutting costs. The lack of royalties is just a bonus excuse for why they didn't undertake the time or effort to try to work together.
Four cents and 10.2Gb/s. Done.
Which is currently greater than what DisplayPort can offer at all, and has the headroom to exceed what DisplayPort will offer at the end of 2009. There is no near term (within 5-10 years) difference in resolution or color capacity that will cap out HDMI. Stop the FUD. Seriously.
That's the side of the argument I was trying to make as well. Money rules, even if a competing technology is better.
It's happened before, and I suspect will continue.
Royalties are a per unit cost unless it is tiered or capped. The more you sell, the more it matters exactly the same amount as it did when you sold half that.
The lovely logic displayed on these forums by armchair businessmen isn't always the same logic displayed by the businessmen running the OEMs. Heck, just look at the #1 and #2 OEMs. The played cut-throat with their profit margins to the point that this downturn is causing them to freak-out and not be 100% certain how well they will survive it themselves. They obviously aren't thinking in the same space of 'saving money' that we are. Most American-owned companies don't even bother to look past 6 months when planning for profitability.
USB still manages to beat out Firewire for mass storage and other external devices suited better for Firewire in part due to royalty costs and per unit costs (less so these days because of that, and more so because USB has already 'won'). eSata is making headway for the same reasons, since you can start sharing components with your internal SATA bus, making it cheap from the get-go.
I say that I don't think the PC guys and the HT guys can sit down and make a spec is the same reason it is hard enough to get an industry to sit down and make a spec: spec by committee will give you a solid, long-term spec, but the reality is that it will be a horrible-to-implement spec, and only part of the things each member in the group wants it to do.
Throw more people in the mix, and it becomes an even bigger bag of compromises. Forcing them to sit down and 'pick one' may hurt both camps in the long run as one camp might require that the other give up something important to their customers in order to make implementing the uber-spec easier on their end for their customers.
UPnP is a perfect example of an uber-spec that really winds up being overengineered, and troublesome for people trying to implement the spec from scratch. Too many things to too many people, but not enough to the right people.
In a lot of ways, I don't want to see the benefit of HDMI soiled by the PC engineers, to be honest... and I don't see the PC engineers accepting the 'you must do this' parts of the HDMI spec en masse.
In the case of HDMI, the royalties are per unit and for annual membership. Greater sales numbers means that the membership cost is amortized to the point of oblivion. The total per-unit cost diminishes as volume increases. If you sell 100 units, it costs you $4 in royalties and about $5000 in membership dues, or $50.04 per unit. If you sell 10,000, it's $0.54. Eventually, when you get to the sales levels of any company we buy from, they're splitting that few thousand dollars over millions of units, and the membership fees are effectively zero.
The issue is that the royalty cost is a minor per-unit cost at best, and the savings on royalties at this point are grossly outweighed by the implementation costs of developing and then switching to DisplayPort, whose overall hardware is today far more expensive than the royalty savings, even ignoring the development costs. The royalty issue is nothing more than an excuse for the PC companies taking their toys out of the standards sandbox. They are not and will not be saving any actual money on DP for the foreseeable future, per unit, with the exception of direct drive displays, which are incredibly rare.
This is more signficant in the case of Firewire for three reasons: (1) the per-unit costs are higher (the royalty is more than six times what HDMI is, and the actual hardware costs are significantly higher), (2) the actual silicon implementation is larger and substantially more power-intensive, and (3) USB devices are both much smaller and much cheaper on the whole than display devices, and many run on bus power or disposable batteries, entirely unlike display devices, amplifying the significance of the first two problems.
It's not a particularly good example on the facts.
They're both specs by committee, and there's very little difference in what is wanted by both sides. As someone involved in many technology sector standards, in development and implementation litigation, the amount of work needlessly duplicated by DisplayPort is far greater than the additional work involved in the relatively minor conflicts between PC and CE groups. I think you're overlooking the fact that the same corporations make both displays, and the difference is in the periphery--PC makers are not HT makers, but each is only half of the respective camp.
Such as? You're arguing a generality, despite the fact that there is no significant difference here.
This all sounds well and good, but there's no basis for it. Soiled by the PC engineers? How? 'You must do this parts' of HDMI--are almost entirely what makes it effective as a display standard. Do you have an example of anything that would be cause for resistance? "PC engineers" already implement HDMI en masse, in its entirety, without problem or complaint. HDMI moreover already exists in a mature form for HT/CE applications, and a packet-based addition would not put it in a position to be "soiled", whatever that means.
I'm fine with HDMI for CE application and DisplayPort for computing application.
There will be some overlap much as there is today but frankly I expect to be connecting my devices over an IP network which matters more to me than how my display is attached.
Someone refresh my memory does HDMI offers fibre optic connections?
Ah yes...google is my friend.
http://www2.dvigear.com/hdfiopca.html
Time will sort this out but I doubt that a new connection is all that significant other than people who have legacy equipment (which DP supports for the most part)
There will be some overlap much as there is today but frankly I expect to be connecting my devices over an IP network which matters more to me than how my display is attached.
Someone refresh my memory does HDMI offers fibre optic connections?
Ah yes...google is my friend.
http://www2.dvigear.com/hdfiopca.html
Time will sort this out but I doubt that a new connection is all that significant other than people who have legacy equipment (which DP supports for the most part)
Exactly. It works the same way with computer operating systems. Yes there are free or cheaper alternatives than windows. But it isn't about unit cost of the product (the OS itself), its the switching costs that matter. Right now, HDMI is worth the small cost simply because it meets current requirements, the alternatives are lacking, and it actually has current adoption by people in large enough numbers.
Yes, I was referring to the notebooks, since the LED ACD's webcam, mic and speakers are USB based. My bad; I should have phrased it "Apple's implementation on the unibody MacBooks/MacBook Pros..."
A friend of mine recently bought a very nice Sony camcorder with mini HDMI, and I wasn't impressed with the mini version. The connector (on the cable) is too thin and feels really fragile...way too fragile to use on a computer. I can easily see it snapping/bending if it got yanked. I'd be perfectly happy to see a regular-sized HDMI port on the MacBooks. The mini-HDMI specification is used on camcorders to save space because of its smaller size, but that wouldn't be necessary on a MacBook or an iMac. IMVHO.
The HDMI and DisplayPort connectors are pretty much the same size. As others have noted, Apple could have used standard DisplayPort connectors on the laptops, instead of inventing a new proprietary connector.
Can you compare mini-HDMI to mini-DisplayPort as far as the quality/durability of the connector?
It's not Apple's implementation of anything. DisplayPort notebooks do not currently support audio passthrough, regardless of manufacturer.Yes, I was referring to the notebooks, since the LED ACD's webcam, mic and speakers are USB based. My bad; I should have phrased it "Apple's implementation on the unibody MacBooks/MacBook Pros..."