Products · Pattern or everyday thing

HDMI

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with HDMI, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

CEC behaves inconsistently and took a long time to get working reliably2026-07-22
Turn-on-TV-turns-on-devices setting defaults on, so a connected PlayStation powers up unexpectedly2026-02-23
Hard to keep track of which HDMI versions, cables and ports support which resolutions and refresh rates2025-01-20
Randomly gets 'HDCP not supported' errors when presenting, with no clear reason why2025-01-20
Devices unpredictably fail to power on or off together, forcing guesswork each time2025-01-10
Apple TV randomly switches the receiver input while the user is watching another source2024-12-14
Hard to plug in when it's dark or in hard-to-reach places2023-10-09
Wall-mounted TVs make it hard to see and guess the HDMI port orientation2023-10-09
Cable sleeve says "hi speed" but it only delivers 4K at 30Hz, so the real capability is hidden2023-01-11
Has to plug laptop into TV via HDMI every time to watch a movie2023-01-05
Switching HDMI ports to start video chat adds friction for parents2022-11-12
CEC standard leaves device behaviour unspecified, so volume and device control often fail2022-03-31
EARC audio often fails to work until restarting devices, then randomly cuts out for seconds2021-12-13
Standards and licensing bodies turn user-hostile, making it confusing which features a cable or port supports2021-12-13
HDMI defaults to washed-out colours and user can't find how to fix it2021-04-22
HDMI connections are infuriating to get working2017-06-07