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
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.