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Rule of Big Tech
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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I mean honestly:
A) Bluetooth spec is insane
B) Audio requires a driver write
All I'm saying is it's not exactly "easy", like I don't think they're intentionally blocking this for anti competitive reasons, I bet it's more so cost of development, with an added benefit of driving purchases of proprietary accessories. Bluetooth is a terrible stack that's super difficult to implement
When I first got a PS4 and tried to connect my headset to it I was told of was unsupported. After doing some digging I found that the only supported bluetooth headsets were specifically the ones that were branded as PlayStation. This wasn't the case with the PS3, it was just a decision Sony made in order to sell their overpriced headsets.
I have a headset on my PS5 that isn't from Sony. Just get a Bluetooth dongle. Damn, people in this thread are drowning in a glass of water.
The PS5 already have Bluetooth capabilities that are limited artificially by Sony.
The sole reason for that is greed. It is dumb as hell that you need a Bluetooth dongle on a machine that has Bluetooth in order to use a Bluetooth headset of your choice.
I know, but a dongle is very cheap and most good headsets come with dongles. It's not super big deal. I understand it isn't ethical but I just don't see this preventing anyone from buying another headset they actually like.
Bluetooth has an audio delay that is detrimental to games. You can buy a dongle and use other headsets as well. There’s nothing nefarious here:
Why not put a warning when connecting a Bluetooth headset instead of outright blocking it?
I had similar, my Bluetooth headphones that I'd been using with the PS3 didn't work on my PS4, but I think the reason given was that they didn't support Bluetooth encryption standards or something.
Like bro, I do not care if someone eavesdrops the audio of my Kingdom Hearts session - just give me the choice
I don't know enough about this really to speak on it, but I think if there was a problem with encryption, a person could spoof a connection to your device and get your passwords or other data maybe. There was a big data leak a few years ago from someone getting into a network through a smart fridge or similar device because of weak security standards.
If the nintendo switch can do it, so should a PS5.
The bluetooth stack for a company of this size is a solved problem.
Because bluetooth audio playback is part of the kernel and pulseaudio/pipewire (and more) and unless sony want to run those on the ps5 (which arguably would be a bad idea at this point) that's not really a useful analogy.
A better question is why a dedicated gaming company like nintendo could at least get some audio working while ps5 made by a much bigger and more diverse company can't.
Arguably it's because ps5 is a home console and audio playback is the realm of the tv or receiver/soundbar in that setting and they are more concerned with showing ads and spying on you than basic functionality nowadays...
Bluetooth and bluetooth audio are very different things. Bluetooth audio support seem rather weak and users seem to be using usb audio blootooth dongles created for pa4 and ps5 such as https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MF5S5YX rather than a generic bluetooth transciever.
What little freebsd support for bluetooth audio there is seem to rely on specific audio backend software and since I'm assuming ps5 has surround sound, atmos and whatnot they probably threw that out of the window early on during development.
With that said sony has done plenty of graphical stuff on what I assume is their custom display driver suchas 3d, vrr, hdr. So them having plenty of custom modules on top of freebsd can't really be an excuse so I'd just cook it down to sony priorities.
Also, fuck developing for bluetooth. Hate that janky specification...
The biggest thing with Bluetooth audio is the codec used between the headphones and the source. The most basic is SBC which nearly everything supports, however it's pretty low quality and high latency which makes it inappropriate for gaming.
Pretty much every other option involves licensing fees, and there's nothing really universal. Apple's stuff uses AAC and more recently Apple Lossless, Sony's stuff tends to use LDAC, anyone using Qualcomm chips gets AptX sometimes in HD and lossless variants. If you don't match on codecs, you end up on the shit-tier SBC codec, which isn't fit for purpose here.
After licensing, they would need to write support for all these codecs into the playstation sound system and to get the latency down to an acceptable level for gaming, you might even need hardware codec chips, I'm not sure.
Bluetooth audio is the wild west, and given all the above I can't really blame them for not supporting it
Edit: out of curiosity I had a look, there's LHDC, LC3 & Samsung's own one now on top of everything else
That's not how it works. It's not like they can just pull down FreeBSD and it comes with a driver written for whatever Bluetooth hardware they have. They still have to write the driver that actually interfaces with the hardware that Sony chose to bring into the PS5. Maybe there's already a driver for the chip that Sony has, they could fork it and tweak it for the PS5, but honestly, they likely have a fairly proprietary setup. No off the shelf or upstream code will be able to do this.
They already implement a Bluetooth microphone via their controller