> For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
If I understood the article correctly, you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store. All stakeholders win. Licensor. OEM. Microsoft. We made the pie bigger!
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
Let's just say unless you are buying Windows Enterprise the deployment method of this is basically unmanageable for businesses. Like... individuals need their own Microsoft accounts to buy it for their own PC sort of unmanageable.
There's a way to volume license HEVC but only for very specific enterprise categories, others just can't.
In almost every other way, Dell is probably the most manageable hardware OEM. Fantastic support for automatable, scripted driver and firmware updates, a very consistent and unified platform, easily hot-swappable parts, and a great on-site repair coverage.
I think what's happening here is not that HP and Dell don't want to pay the four cents a device, but as it reflects a 20% price increase in the license, they are "drawing a line" for the license company that increasing cost will cost them money, not make them money. I suspect if it works this problem will resolve itself next year, it just sucks for customers.
>you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store.
That is just a software decoder running on the CPU.
HP and Dell are effectively killing any way to hardware-decode (and encode?) HEVC on these models. Which is a thing you want on a power- and heat-limited device such as a laptop.
If it were, they could 20x their margin numbers by raising prices $1 across the board.
It shows how much disdain they have for their customers though, that they won’t at least make it a 25 ¢ line item upgrade for customers who actually care. Instead customers have to pay $20 or whatever for an inferior software decoder.
I don't think it's fair to blame HP and Dell here; the greed of MPEG LA, which is increasing its licensing price, is the cause. It's problematic to globally allow the patent system and this kind of licensing; it's a real brake on innovation (and here we have proof of it). VP9 and AV1, for example, are not affected because they are free and open source.
VP9 and AV1 are less affected not because they're free and open source, but because they're backed by large-enough companies (Google) and a consortium that promised they won't claim royalties for the patents used in the formats. Companies outside Google or the consortium can still claim royalties, and indeed they do. See the Sisvel VP9/AV1 patent pool for an example of patent holders claiming royalties for technologies used in VP9 and AV1.
I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?
It doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
But it is still more performant to do so in general. There are more image corrections of great quality happening than just background removal nowadays, like lighting improvements or sometimes upscaling, and you wouldn't want to do all that on the CPU.
But also, HW encoding of some codecs is not always of great quality and doesn't support the advanced features required for RTC, so the CPU encoding code-path is sometimes even forced! While it doesn't necessarily apply to HEVC as you'd need a license for it (and almost all apps rely on the system having one), it's happening for VP9 or AV1 occasionally more frequently.
Hmm.. I guess if this explains why my new work Dell Latitude becomes extremely laggy and unstable when doing Teams meetings with multiple video streams. My 5+ year older Dell Latitude did not have this problem.
Nope, boss2 fixes those complaints and gets the relevant complaint rate down by 300%. Everybody conveniently forgets why it was so high in the first place.
1. I doubt that there is much if any overlap between companies that simultaneously do not evaluate the requirements thoroughly for the laptops that they purchase, but also are able to trace an issue with Microsoft teams down to a processor feature specification in the laptops that they've purchased, and that there are enough of these companies that they create a statistically relevant number of complaints to the upstream vendor
2. Complaints that do not translate into lost sales have no financially actionable relevance. I think you are greatly overestimating the amount that these organizations care. If your job is to sell laptop, money talks.
The fear may also be that if they pay this there will be further increases in the price. its going up 20% in a few months. What if they think it will double next time, and then in another year etc?
Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.
To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
HEVC is far from being the most popular codec on the planet in the context of video conferencing. Most implementations are using WebRTC and as it is unevenly supported and AV1 support is becoming more prominent and stable, most implementations are going from H264/VP8 -> VP9 -> AV1 and skip HEVC entirely.
Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.
You are right that a customer won't balk at a $1 price increase, but -- customers balking at $1 isn't the reason why value engineering has won in the marketplace.
If they ship, say 20m laptops a year that's $800k. I can't imagine what cars their executives are dinging if their repair is orders of magnitude more than that. How many orders is it?
And if you've made $50 on each, that's literally a BILLION dollars in profit, and if their financials are true, that would be 1/22nd of their FY2024 profits. So you would be responsible for the bottom line going down by 0.0036%.
I don't know why you're saying this. Doesn't seem related. The point is that if the price goes up now then it can go up again, and where does it end? This process is how prices are kept in check, and is why laptops don't cost $1m each.
Isn't there a certification for ms teams for pcs? I've seen a lot of headsets and speakers with a "certified for ms teams" badge on it. I guess Microsoft needs to extend it to laptops too, make hevc support mandatory and tell their customers.
And does the background blurring part of their pipeline somehow consume the raw H.265 bitstream directly..? Wouldn't they be blurring based on the raw pixel buffer, before any encoding takes place?
Someone elsewhere in the thread replied that it has to do with the blurring happening on the GPU combined with bandwidth issues reading that dataset back followed by software encoding the video.
If I understand that all correctly blurring is cheap when you already have the raw video data on the gpu for encoding, but introduces too much latency when combined with software encoding.
Software blur should be possible, but the feature has not been implemented and would not be nearly as cheap as it is on the gpu
The problem is double dipping. If Intel and AMD represent 100% of all x86 Laptop. In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together. And all x86 devices would have HEVC licenses. HP and Dell shouldn't have to pay for it.
In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
Luckily H.264 High Profile is already patent free in many countries and soon to be patent free in US too. Let's hope AV2 really get its act together this time around. Then the world would just be H.264 as baseline and AV2 for high quality.
It could get us out of this mess after a decade of it's hardware encoder/decoder being built into things. If we all just switched to it now, if everything shipped with hardware encoder for AV1 now magically, it would still be a decade before the pre-existing computers/devices were no longer used and AV1 could actually be a default. That's only become possible with HEVC recently.
I do look forwards to an open future. But it's no quick solution.
I agree with your end state desire, but don't shrug off the parent point. Why does dell have to think about license fees for a hardware feature sold to them by a CPU company?
Because they're using a video format which demands licencing fees from multiple organisations (Via-LA, Access Advance, Velos Media, Technicolor). They demand payment.
Patent pools consist of a bunch of lawyers seeking to parasitically extract revenue from implementers of the format. They don't do anything else.
They're all going to hike the licencing fees to maximum they can get away with. They will approach businesses and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."
To HP's and Dell's utter astonishment, they have discovered that when you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
What HP and Dell should do instead is focus on royalty-free video formats like VP9, AV1, and the future AV2 and join the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
> In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once
> In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
The fee is payed by the one who makes it "available" to the enduser. AMD and Intel pay nothing, they implement "math" accelerating it, but they do not "provide" it to a customer. The fee is collected by the last one in the chain enabling it for the customer.
So Dell selling a product supporting it out of the box as a complete "experience" is the last in the chain. If e.g. Dell doesn't support it and the user acquires the "enabling piece" from the Microsoft Store, then Microsoft has to pay it. That's why U.S. based Linux distros (backed by a company) disable the codecs, because they would be the last in the chain (e.g. by shipping the "enabler" through mesa). For the same reason Firefox would be on the hook, if they ship the "enabling" part - which they get around for h.264 by providing a blob payed by Oracle or relying on the OS facilities for h.265.
The article is a bit light on technical details. Can someone shed a light on how hardware decoding is disabled? Do they blow an efuse, disable it in the firmware or in the OS?
It's not disabled in the sense many people are thinking. The codecs just aren't installed by default. The hardware is present and still functional. You just have to use software that directly supports HEVC or buy your own HEVC license on the Microsoft store for $1 to get system-wide hardware accelerated HEVC codecs.
That seems like the opposite of what the quoted Reddit post says:
>those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled
From this it sounds like it's been disabled at a lower level, but Windows still expects it to be there and so fails to decode streams unless hwaccel is disabled
I don't understand why people downvote questions like this rather than just answer the question. It's a perfectly reasonable question imo given that it's not clear how this feature is being disabled. It appears that most of this is based on reddit speculation and the OEMs don't provide a definitive answer.
Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.
There has been a change in behavior in the past few years, in fact it used to be that you could only become a HN member that can comment thus vote by posting a select number of threads before being able to comment. This actually kept the community on the more intelligent, factual, and serious side. Now it's not so serious.
This used to be the only place that I could visit to get away from Reddit behavior. It seems like the more obscure a social gathering is, the less Eternal September it suffers.
> Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.
The term "orange reddit" feels more and more like reality as time goes on.
From what I'd heard, it's the actual HP and Dell OEM'ed drivers they provide for the hardware. If you load the official Intel drivers, HEVC works fine.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
Isn't it something that was already sold to me as a customer? I don't get it how company could remove one of the features that has been already sold to me.
It only affects new devices, they don't pull the existing licenses.
Not every device includes a HEVC license. For cheap consumer devices or custom built PCs no license is the norm. It just used to be the norm for the premium brands to include the license with every device.
While true, that's not immediately apparent in the article, and the opposite of what the headline implies. Ars should really do better. Past Ars would have. The enshittification continues...
Edit: I was wrong, I misread “purchase” as “purchased” which aligned with my (flawed) memory of what happened and it made sense with the full sentence. Original comment remains below.
> no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch
...
> customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app
Edit: I misread “purchase” as “purchased”, which is wrong.
You’re removing the important part. Here’s the full sentence, with emphasis:
> According to the tech giant, customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app on their devices, but when tapped, users will get a message saying the feature is no longer available.
In other words, you saw the icon for the app but it didn’t work. The feature had been removed even for those who had already paid for it.
I stand corrected. Despite reading the sentence multiple times, my brain autocorrected “purchase” to “purchased”. My memory was that they had retroactively removed the feature, but on further reading it looks like I’m misremembering.
Is there any chance that this is part of a good-faith attempt to apply pressure to the patent pool consortium*? They are presumably now missing out on a substantial license fee revenue stream, and may wish to regain Dell and HP as licensees by lowering the price? There must be some thread of rationality over at patent pool HQ that knows this is just going to hyper-accelerate the migration away from HEVC to other codecs, as well as make VVC completely toxic?
* Not sure if consortium is the right word. Racket maybe?
I don't think everyone gets what is going on here. This is not just to save a few cents, as they could just add a $1.00 charge to every order if they wanted that.
AV1 exists and is both better than HEVC and royalty free. H.264/AVC patents are either expired or rapidly expiring. Their likely end goal is to phase HEVC out completely, avoid VVC, and not have to deal with this licensing system at all anymore. And that makes sense. There's a good chance that practically all manufacturers will start doing this.
For users, does it really matter? AV1 is being adopted faster than HEVC ever was. Beyond that, AVC has always been far more common than HEVC. It likely won't affect you, and if it does, it's easy to fix or will fix itself.
This argument goes back to the 1990s with the MP3 format (which was patent encumbered at the time). There was an attempt to adopt an unencumbered competitor called Ogg Vorbis, but it never got any traction.
I don't know why. It's pretty much the same argument we're seeing now with JPEG XL. Ogg works perfectly fine & is a completely servicable audio codec, but browsers just took it out of their supported codecs and devices like iPods didn't support it for whatever reason, so "normies" (to use the parlance) weren't aware of it and just went with MP3 for anything and everything.
I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...
The p2p audio piracy portion of Napster was shut down by 2001. The other common p2p sharing platforms like Kazaa, gnutella, et al. mostly supported any type of audio format (at least from what I can remember). People wanted mp3 because in their mind, mp3 == music. The hardware devices like iPod & Zune mostly had support only for formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF (I asked ai this, so take that for what it's worth).
Anyway, it's just another example of hardware mfgs not supporting open formats, so we don't need to get too deep in the weeds trying to remember history.
I remember the history quite well and it was just a matter of ecosystem and momentum.
MP3 had mindshare. That's was what people knew and it was what people asked for. People bought MP3 players. People built software that ripped MP3s. The sales guy at the electronics store knew what MP3 was. Everything worked with MP3 and so that was what people bought and downloaded and used.
The history of media (and especially video) on the Internet was certainly not built on royalty-free formats or protocols. The stuff has been a problem for decades, and it's only recently that things have gotten better.
Of course it was. It was delivered by HTTP (royalty-free), RTSP\RTP\RTCP (royalty-free), and TCP/IP (royalty-free) and depended on DNS (royalty-free) and HTML and friends (royalty-free). Video over the internet wouldn't have worked without royalty-free formats and protocols supporting it.
Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.
The internet is also built on not caring about rules/regulations, and provides a treasure trove of things that are normally not obtainable due to whatever regulations.
But it doesn't really apply when big entities with a lot of money are making the video conferencing services that would be using paid codecs. Then the consortiums have clear targets to request licenses to be paid.
Is it possible to just buy the HEVC extension on the Microsoft store to enable it?
I have a PC that came without the license, and I had to buy it to get everything working. It was more an annoyance than a problem, it's only a 99 cent purchase.
It is likely linked to increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026. The increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026 are due to a 25% rate adjustment announced by Access Advance LLC, which manages the HEVC Advance patent pool. https://accessadvance.com/2025/07/21/access-advance-announce...
So the fault is at purchasing departments, that buy incompatible laptops. They would probably need to order hevc as an option, or roll out licenses via MDM.
Individual buyers can just buy the HEVC license from the Windows store. I think windows even opens the store, if the codec is missing. A lot of companies disable the public App Store on their MDM though.
If missing licenses impact end users on a larger scale, it's also a communication issue from the manufacturers. This won't do them any good, as customers will be annoyed from the bad user experience. Even if one in 100 customers switches the brand, they make a loss.
> While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
Not for HP or Dell. Maybe I've been working in BigTech for too long, but I can't even count that low anymore. $25M is a rounding error for most major product lines I've worked on in the past decade. But, then again, every hardware producing team I've worked on had this exact penny-pinching attitude on BOM cost. They'd throw away $25M opex like it's nothing, but spend $0.25 extra on the BOM?? Never!!!
I mean if the laptop cost $300 (feels like a very conservative estimate) providing HEVC would cost them. Lets see here... 1% would be $3, 0.33% would be $1, and the price per consumer of including the functionality would be a quarter of that, 0.0825% of the cost -- roughly a tenth of a percent.
What is the value (to the company) of the consumer saving 25c on the purchase price and then having such a godawful experience with the product that they say "I would never buy this again, nor ever tell anyone else to buy it"
The company very much doesn't want the customer to know that it spent $20 of the customer's money in wasted productivity to save itself 25 cents
Nokia has a legal complaint [1] against HP related to H.264 and H.265 filed October 2023. It even mentions H.265 on consumer devices being an infringement. I sort of doubt this is about paying $0.04 more per laptop - there must be some uncertainty or legal risk maybe in certain chipsets or something.
And if you decide to buy the extension from Microsoft (i.e. pay for the license yourself) on you Windows 11 machine, you are (in Microsoft's great QA fashion) greeted with:
> Play High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) videos in any video app on your Windows 10 device. These extensions are designed to take advantage of hardware capabilities on some newer devices— including those with an Intel 7th Generation Core processor and newer GPU to support 4K and Ultra HD content. For devices that don’t have hardware support for HEVC videos, software support is provided, but the playback experience might vary based on the video resolution and PC performance. These extensions also let you encode HEVC content on devices that don’t have a hardware-based video encoder.
Not even that, you just need to know the "hidden" link to the codecs, then it's free. I'm sure Microsoft is well aware of these links, there are many articles about them.
Pretending that this about taking a stand against patent holders of HEVC is absurd. HP and Dell clearly see the writing on the wall. PCs are a mature technology now—my 10 year old i7 6700k runs AAA games from this year fluently (albeit with an updated GPU). A laptop bought in 2025 should be entirely adequate for virtually any business task for a decade barring wear and tear or an entirely new software paradigm.
I've been working with Intel to fix an issue in recent GPU drivers that prevents HEVC playback from working and I believe that's the real issue here rather than the licensing conclusion that this article jumps to.
How much relevant is HEVC on computers? I encounter H.264, VP9 and AV1 and that is pretty much all. I know HEVC is used on Blu-ray and in DVB-T, but that is usually played by dedicated hardware, not PC.
Many things that used to be h.264 are now using h.265 (hevc). Without this license a lot of applications can't play hevc at all, they rely on the codecs included in windows (which are unavailable without a license). They either fall back to another codec, or stop working. The article mentioned issues with videos playback in browsers and issues with ms teams.
Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.
Video calls and some live streamings. Steam Remote Play (together), Sunshine/Moonlight and Parsec for gaming where you can easily check the client's capabilities and go with whatever is best. Discord also does similar for video calls I believe. Steams newer game recording feature also only supports h264/h265 with no AV1 support.
It is used a lot more for people who don't have to worry too much about licensing at scale, such as pirate content or local streaming (quite often backed by an OS wide license). Doing a quick search on various pirate content search engine, I can see a lot of AV1 content now, so it'll eventually get more popular!
I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible
HEVC is pretty much a straight improvement over h264. Same quality, much smaller file sizes, and it's actually got HW decode supported in most integrated GPUs unlike av1. I've been converting all my h264 stuff, saves a lot of space on my disks.
Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
Yeah, just because some data hoarder on the internet has TBs of videos doesn't mean that's normal. So weird call out.
It is however a call out of the GP as well for not knowing how ubiquitous something can be while not being shoved in your face that it is being used. The GP is evidently unaware that most streaming services will offer an h.265 encode for those users that can use it as the bandwidth savings make it very worthwhile. Mobile devices are using HEVC by default now as well as at least iOS using a still image variant. From reading elsewhere in these comments, clearly MS Teams uses it as well.
So just because you don't know it is being used does not mean it is not being used the way you might think.
Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.
Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.
youtube has never and will never come to support x265 they even tried to block support from chrome becuase they hate it that much
they support x264,vp8/vp9, av1 and soon av2
they literally started and entire organisation to take on mpeg called aomedia
Pretty much everything modern except Apple. Intel since 11th gen (2021), AMD since Zen4 (2022), Samsung phones since 2021, Google phones since 2021, Mediatek since 2020.
With modern lifecycles the way they are, that's probably ~60-80% of everything out there.
Kind of. But where does it stop. Looking at a 24 cent license in isolation does sound silly. But what about when you add up Windows, h265, h264, mp3, aac, HDMI, ... You can't throw in every single feature into a laptop because it is cheap individually. Eventually they add up. Not to mention that in addition to per-unit fees lots of these have required memberships and certification which may add up, especially on lower volume products.
IMHO the fact that this wasn't visible on any product page was pretty awful, especially when this was a near globally included feature before. Maybe in an ideal world the customer would be able to pick which licenses they want individually when purchasing the device (or add them on at a later time). But that is beyond the knowledge of most consumers and has other downsides.
So while I do consider this choice to be pretty silly. I do find it hard to draw the line of at what point it is clearly ridiculous.
I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but ruin your user experience?
It's like Samsung uses faulty "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor on some of the cheaper phones (including S series FE phones) which results in butt dialing: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/o56uz4/s20_fe_pock... -- seriously, is this the place they need to be frugal?
Or, although this is a matter of more than a few dollars -- all ThinkPad T series screens are terrible with low brightness and 45% NTSC color range, unless your IT department is nice enough to purchase a version with upgraded screen, which is almost guaranteed to never happen.
I used to like to hate on Apple, but these days, I appreciate how they don't cheap out on things so that user never needs to double check a specific thing in the spec sheet and deal with the mess.
>I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but
>ruin your user experience?
How? Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
If they were approached by mpreg, I cannot blame them for choosing to disable the codecs over paying the racket.
I just wish they made a public statement about it at the time, and were loud about it in their product pages, rather than customers having to find out in this manner.
Name and shame, and recommend customers to use AOM codecs, rather than silently handle it.
VP8 was never competitive with H.264 – like WebP the apparent savings was due to lowering detail by double-encoding. Since people care about battery life / fan noise it only made sense if you were running a huge operation with the infrastructure to encode variants for niche combinations as well as the mainstream devices.
VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.
> Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
Like everything? Its objectively better in every way.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, RDP, Teams, etc...
You'll note that Zoom and Webex aren't listed which is why Teams provides sharper screen sharing with less bandwidth. Its likely they also didn't want to pay the shiny nickel to have happier users.
EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
> As far as I am aware, Netflix, like youtube, use AOM codecs.
That is incorrect. Youtube chooses the best available automatically. Unless you have a slow network or obsolete device you're probably getting h.265.
Netflix defaults to h265 for their own content because they want it to look good. They let licensed content use the cheaper AOM codecs because they don't care how it looks.
Blu ray is still relevant, especially 4k UHD Blu Ray. It is still the only way to watch most films in decent quality. Streaming services average a bitrate of 8-16 Mbps. A few top out over 35. A 4k UHD Blu Ray averages around 80-130Mbps.
Try watching a horror film on any streaming service. Notice the blocks in the background of dark scenes where the various black levels dither into each other? That's called macroblocking and you'll get it with most/all streaming services because they're low quality. It's not a natural and normal part of the scene. You won't get that with blu ray.
People with large screens, or folks that are just very sensitive to it will always prefer the disk.
Your phone likely records videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years). If you want to watch your own videos on a PC, you'll have to deal with the codec.
>Your phone likely is recording videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years).
Checked. Seems to be h264+aac.
Arguably not a recent phone (OnePlus 3), although I feel no pressure to upgrade.
The current plan is to wait for first Google Pixel using RISC-V. Next year I would say it's fifty-fifty chance, informed by the switch to PowerVR GPU this year on their SoC, and next years expected general availability of RVA23 cores.
> For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
Note that it's not a $0.24 increase Dell and HP are upset over, its an increase of $0.04. The price they were paying was $0.20.
So if you have a Dell or HP laptop, your hardware acceleration is broken because your experience with the hardware isn't worth $0.04 to the OEM.
Your hardware acceleration is broken because zoom doesn't run AV1?
I get your point but wonder why av1 isn't being phased in.
If I understood the article correctly, you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store. All stakeholders win. Licensor. OEM. Microsoft. We made the pie bigger!
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
Let's just say unless you are buying Windows Enterprise the deployment method of this is basically unmanageable for businesses. Like... individuals need their own Microsoft accounts to buy it for their own PC sort of unmanageable.
There's a way to volume license HEVC but only for very specific enterprise categories, others just can't.
No one is forcing businesses to buy brands that are unmanagable.
In almost every other way, Dell is probably the most manageable hardware OEM. Fantastic support for automatable, scripted driver and firmware updates, a very consistent and unified platform, easily hot-swappable parts, and a great on-site repair coverage.
I think what's happening here is not that HP and Dell don't want to pay the four cents a device, but as it reflects a 20% price increase in the license, they are "drawing a line" for the license company that increasing cost will cost them money, not make them money. I suspect if it works this problem will resolve itself next year, it just sucks for customers.
>you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store.
That is just a software decoder running on the CPU. HP and Dell are effectively killing any way to hardware-decode (and encode?) HEVC on these models. Which is a thing you want on a power- and heat-limited device such as a laptop.
I understood the article to say that it was a driver that enabled the hardware and not a software decoder.
I don’t think that’s true. I think if you buy that you are getting software decoding which is going to be worse and consume more power.
> because your experience with the hardware isn't worth $0.04 to the OEM.
That is their entire profit margin.
If it were, they could 20x their margin numbers by raising prices $1 across the board.
It shows how much disdain they have for their customers though, that they won’t at least make it a 25 ¢ line item upgrade for customers who actually care. Instead customers have to pay $20 or whatever for an inferior software decoder.
I don't think it's fair to blame HP and Dell here; the greed of MPEG LA, which is increasing its licensing price, is the cause. It's problematic to globally allow the patent system and this kind of licensing; it's a real brake on innovation (and here we have proof of it). VP9 and AV1, for example, are not affected because they are free and open source.
VP9 and AV1 are less affected not because they're free and open source, but because they're backed by large-enough companies (Google) and a consortium that promised they won't claim royalties for the patents used in the formats. Companies outside Google or the consortium can still claim royalties, and indeed they do. See the Sisvel VP9/AV1 patent pool for an example of patent holders claiming royalties for technologies used in VP9 and AV1.
> I don't think it's fair to blame HP and Dell here; the greed of MPEG LA [...] is the cause.
Why not both? :)
I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?
It doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
But it is still more performant to do so in general. There are more image corrections of great quality happening than just background removal nowadays, like lighting improvements or sometimes upscaling, and you wouldn't want to do all that on the CPU.
But also, HW encoding of some codecs is not always of great quality and doesn't support the advanced features required for RTC, so the CPU encoding code-path is sometimes even forced! While it doesn't necessarily apply to HEVC as you'd need a license for it (and almost all apps rely on the system having one), it's happening for VP9 or AV1 occasionally more frequently.
It probably switches video processing to some legacy stack, that doesn't have all the features.
Hmm.. I guess if this explains why my new work Dell Latitude becomes extremely laggy and unstable when doing Teams meetings with multiple video streams. My 5+ year older Dell Latitude did not have this problem.
That will be someone elses area
Boss 1 saved 0.02% of the cost of the laptop, but thanks to scale works out to be $2.4m. He walks away with his $240k bonus.
Boss 2 sees increased complaints about Teams and blames Microsoft.
Nope, boss2 fixes those complaints and gets the relevant complaint rate down by 300%. Everybody conveniently forgets why it was so high in the first place.
1. I doubt that there is much if any overlap between companies that simultaneously do not evaluate the requirements thoroughly for the laptops that they purchase, but also are able to trace an issue with Microsoft teams down to a processor feature specification in the laptops that they've purchased, and that there are enough of these companies that they create a statistically relevant number of complaints to the upstream vendor
2. Complaints that do not translate into lost sales have no financially actionable relevance. I think you are greatly overestimating the amount that these organizations care. If your job is to sell laptop, money talks.
The fear may also be that if they pay this there will be further increases in the price. its going up 20% in a few months. What if they think it will double next time, and then in another year etc?
Then it will still cost less than $1 on a $1,000 laptop?
Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.
To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
HEVC is far from being the most popular codec on the planet in the context of video conferencing. Most implementations are using WebRTC and as it is unevenly supported and AV1 support is becoming more prominent and stable, most implementations are going from H264/VP8 -> VP9 -> AV1 and skip HEVC entirely.
Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.
So add $1 to the retail price? No customer is going to balk at that.
You are right that a customer won't balk at a $1 price increase, but -- customers balking at $1 isn't the reason why value engineering has won in the marketplace.
Or just eat it. As a company you lose magnitudes more money when one of your executives dings a rental car.
If they ship, say 20m laptops a year that's $800k. I can't imagine what cars their executives are dinging if their repair is orders of magnitude more than that. How many orders is it?
And if you've made $50 on each, that's literally a BILLION dollars in profit, and if their financials are true, that would be 1/22nd of their FY2024 profits. So you would be responsible for the bottom line going down by 0.0036%.
I don't know why you're saying this. Doesn't seem related. The point is that if the price goes up now then it can go up again, and where does it end? This process is how prices are kept in check, and is why laptops don't cost $1m each.
Isn't there a certification for ms teams for pcs? I've seen a lot of headsets and speakers with a "certified for ms teams" badge on it. I guess Microsoft needs to extend it to laptops too, make hevc support mandatory and tell their customers.
Does MS Teams actually use HEVC rather than VP9 or AV1?
If so, time for customers to complain to Microsoft.
And does the background blurring part of their pipeline somehow consume the raw H.265 bitstream directly..? Wouldn't they be blurring based on the raw pixel buffer, before any encoding takes place?
Someone elsewhere in the thread replied that it has to do with the blurring happening on the GPU combined with bandwidth issues reading that dataset back followed by software encoding the video.
If I understand that all correctly blurring is cheap when you already have the raw video data on the gpu for encoding, but introduces too much latency when combined with software encoding.
Software blur should be possible, but the feature has not been implemented and would not be nearly as cheap as it is on the gpu
H.264 is still hardware accelerated, isn't it?
They were still using H264 last time I checked, so it's irrelevant to them.
If a business gave me Dell laptop to work on, I'd file harassment complaint to HR.
The problem is double dipping. If Intel and AMD represent 100% of all x86 Laptop. In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together. And all x86 devices would have HEVC licenses. HP and Dell shouldn't have to pay for it.
In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
Luckily H.264 High Profile is already patent free in many countries and soon to be patent free in US too. Let's hope AV2 really get its act together this time around. Then the world would just be H.264 as baseline and AV2 for high quality.
> The problem is double dipping.
No, the problem is trying to use royalty-bearing formats for internet video. Royalty-free formats like AV1 avoid the problem.
This is the correct answer. AV1 is amazing and with a bit more funding and hardware support it could get us out of this entire mess.
Intel CPUs have had hardware decode for AV1 since Tiger Lake (2020) and hardware encode support since Meteor Lake (2023).
It could get us out of this mess after a decade of it's hardware encoder/decoder being built into things. If we all just switched to it now, if everything shipped with hardware encoder for AV1 now magically, it would still be a decade before the pre-existing computers/devices were no longer used and AV1 could actually be a default. That's only become possible with HEVC recently.
I do look forwards to an open future. But it's no quick solution.
Well, not everything has an HEVC codec nowadays (e.g., Dell laptops) so HEVC isn't good for that either
I agree with your end state desire, but don't shrug off the parent point. Why does dell have to think about license fees for a hardware feature sold to them by a CPU company?
Because they're using a video format which demands licencing fees from multiple organisations (Via-LA, Access Advance, Velos Media, Technicolor). They demand payment.
Patent pools consist of a bunch of lawyers seeking to parasitically extract revenue from implementers of the format. They don't do anything else.
They're all going to hike the licencing fees to maximum they can get away with. They will approach businesses and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."
To HP's and Dell's utter astonishment, they have discovered that when you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
What HP and Dell should do instead is focus on royalty-free video formats like VP9, AV1, and the future AV2 and join the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
> and then even browser and software.
Firefox is adding non-free codec support like HEVC on the basis that the hardware decoder (reached at through whatever OS API) already has a license.
No double dipping there.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1963910
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924066
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894818
> In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together.
My understanding is that the licensing lawyers learned from Cisco doing that with H.264 for Firefox and there isn’t a cap with H.265.
There is definitely a cap with HEVC Advance and VIA. Not sure if they have closed anything about the H.264 loophole.
> In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once
> In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
The fee is payed by the one who makes it "available" to the enduser. AMD and Intel pay nothing, they implement "math" accelerating it, but they do not "provide" it to a customer. The fee is collected by the last one in the chain enabling it for the customer.
So Dell selling a product supporting it out of the box as a complete "experience" is the last in the chain. If e.g. Dell doesn't support it and the user acquires the "enabling piece" from the Microsoft Store, then Microsoft has to pay it. That's why U.S. based Linux distros (backed by a company) disable the codecs, because they would be the last in the chain (e.g. by shipping the "enabler" through mesa). For the same reason Firefox would be on the hook, if they ship the "enabling" part - which they get around for h.264 by providing a blob payed by Oracle or relying on the OS facilities for h.265.
Until AV3 finally rolls around, of course. Then the world would be just H.264 as baseline and AV3 for high quality.
The article is a bit light on technical details. Can someone shed a light on how hardware decoding is disabled? Do they blow an efuse, disable it in the firmware or in the OS?
It's not disabled in the sense many people are thinking. The codecs just aren't installed by default. The hardware is present and still functional. You just have to use software that directly supports HEVC or buy your own HEVC license on the Microsoft store for $1 to get system-wide hardware accelerated HEVC codecs.
The hardware acceleration is disabled in driver. Even using VLC you won't have acceleration for HEVC.
That seems like the opposite of what the quoted Reddit post says:
>those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled
From this it sounds like it's been disabled at a lower level, but Windows still expects it to be there and so fails to decode streams unless hwaccel is disabled
Even on Linux?
Linux doesn't use the same drivers as windows
Is it confirmed that it is being disabled through drivers?
It doesn't work in windows, but does work in linux
I don't understand why people downvote questions like this rather than just answer the question. It's a perfectly reasonable question imo given that it's not clear how this feature is being disabled. It appears that most of this is based on reddit speculation and the OEMs don't provide a definitive answer.
Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.
There has been a change in behavior in the past few years, in fact it used to be that you could only become a HN member that can comment thus vote by posting a select number of threads before being able to comment. This actually kept the community on the more intelligent, factual, and serious side. Now it's not so serious.
This used to be the only place that I could visit to get away from Reddit behavior. It seems like the more obscure a social gathering is, the less Eternal September it suffers.
> Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.
The term "orange reddit" feels more and more like reality as time goes on.
Sure it's not
> "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."?
:)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why does anyone care about downvotes? Is there somewhere I can cash in my karma points here for something actually valuable?
From what I'd heard, it's the actual HP and Dell OEM'ed drivers they provide for the hardware. If you load the official Intel drivers, HEVC works fine.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
Just like the embedded GPU in a CPU needs a driver to work, the embedded video decoder/encoder also needs a driver.
Isn't it something that was already sold to me as a customer? I don't get it how company could remove one of the features that has been already sold to me.
It only affects new devices, they don't pull the existing licenses.
Not every device includes a HEVC license. For cheap consumer devices or custom built PCs no license is the norm. It just used to be the norm for the premium brands to include the license with every device.
> It only affects new devices, they don't pull the existing licenses.
That actually changes the whole gist.
While true, that's not immediately apparent in the article, and the opposite of what the headline implies. Ars should really do better. Past Ars would have. The enshittification continues...
Edit: I was wrong, I misread “purchase” as “purchased” which aligned with my (flawed) memory of what happened and it made sense with the full sentence. Original comment remains below.
It’s not without precedent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...
The example you provided is exactly the opposite:
> no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch ... > customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app
Edit: I misread “purchase” as “purchased”, which is wrong.
You’re removing the important part. Here’s the full sentence, with emphasis:
> According to the tech giant, customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app on their devices, but when tapped, users will get a message saying the feature is no longer available.
In other words, you saw the icon for the app but it didn’t work. The feature had been removed even for those who had already paid for it.
> the ability to measure blood oxygen levels will no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 models
It says that was on new watches, it doesn't say they retroactively removed the feature from old watches.
I stand corrected. Despite reading the sentence multiple times, my brain autocorrected “purchase” to “purchased”. My memory was that they had retroactively removed the feature, but on further reading it looks like I’m misremembering.
True. Still not exactly feature removed after purchase.
Also this was regulatory pressure which is more like act of god in legalese while removal of h265 is more like we decided to screw customers.
If and only if they indeed removed the feature after purchase.
Is there any chance that this is part of a good-faith attempt to apply pressure to the patent pool consortium*? They are presumably now missing out on a substantial license fee revenue stream, and may wish to regain Dell and HP as licensees by lowering the price? There must be some thread of rationality over at patent pool HQ that knows this is just going to hyper-accelerate the migration away from HEVC to other codecs, as well as make VVC completely toxic?
* Not sure if consortium is the right word. Racket maybe?
I don't think everyone gets what is going on here. This is not just to save a few cents, as they could just add a $1.00 charge to every order if they wanted that.
AV1 exists and is both better than HEVC and royalty free. H.264/AVC patents are either expired or rapidly expiring. Their likely end goal is to phase HEVC out completely, avoid VVC, and not have to deal with this licensing system at all anymore. And that makes sense. There's a good chance that practically all manufacturers will start doing this.
For users, does it really matter? AV1 is being adopted faster than HEVC ever was. Beyond that, AVC has always been far more common than HEVC. It likely won't affect you, and if it does, it's easy to fix or will fix itself.
Royalty-free video formats are the way to go. It avoids the problem in the first place.
The internet is built on royalty-free formats and protocols. Video is not special or different.
This argument goes back to the 1990s with the MP3 format (which was patent encumbered at the time). There was an attempt to adopt an unencumbered competitor called Ogg Vorbis, but it never got any traction.
Less traction than MP3, sure, but “never got any traction” is pushing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Usage
I don't know why. It's pretty much the same argument we're seeing now with JPEG XL. Ogg works perfectly fine & is a completely servicable audio codec, but browsers just took it out of their supported codecs and devices like iPods didn't support it for whatever reason, so "normies" (to use the parlance) weren't aware of it and just went with MP3 for anything and everything.
I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...
One word: Napster.
The p2p audio piracy portion of Napster was shut down by 2001. The other common p2p sharing platforms like Kazaa, gnutella, et al. mostly supported any type of audio format (at least from what I can remember). People wanted mp3 because in their mind, mp3 == music. The hardware devices like iPod & Zune mostly had support only for formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF (I asked ai this, so take that for what it's worth).
Anyway, it's just another example of hardware mfgs not supporting open formats, so we don't need to get too deep in the weeds trying to remember history.
I remember the history quite well and it was just a matter of ecosystem and momentum.
MP3 had mindshare. That's was what people knew and it was what people asked for. People bought MP3 players. People built software that ripped MP3s. The sales guy at the electronics store knew what MP3 was. Everything worked with MP3 and so that was what people bought and downloaded and used.
It got traction with Spotify and pretty much anyone who wasn't locked in via overlapping codecs licence requirements or network effects.
The history of media (and especially video) on the Internet was certainly not built on royalty-free formats or protocols. The stuff has been a problem for decades, and it's only recently that things have gotten better.
Of course it was. It was delivered by HTTP (royalty-free), RTSP\RTP\RTCP (royalty-free), and TCP/IP (royalty-free) and depended on DNS (royalty-free) and HTML and friends (royalty-free). Video over the internet wouldn't have worked without royalty-free formats and protocols supporting it.
Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.
The internet is also built on not caring about rules/regulations, and provides a treasure trove of things that are normally not obtainable due to whatever regulations.
But it doesn't really apply when big entities with a lot of money are making the video conferencing services that would be using paid codecs. Then the consortiums have clear targets to request licenses to be paid.
Is it possible to just buy the HEVC extension on the Microsoft store to enable it?
I have a PC that came without the license, and I had to buy it to get everything working. It was more an annoyance than a problem, it's only a 99 cent purchase.
It is likely linked to increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026. The increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026 are due to a 25% rate adjustment announced by Access Advance LLC, which manages the HEVC Advance patent pool. https://accessadvance.com/2025/07/21/access-advance-announce...
Yes it should work with the codec pack, and they're keeping it on some of their laptops like with dedicated gpus
So the fault is at purchasing departments, that buy incompatible laptops. They would probably need to order hevc as an option, or roll out licenses via MDM.
Individual buyers can just buy the HEVC license from the Windows store. I think windows even opens the store, if the codec is missing. A lot of companies disable the public App Store on their MDM though.
If missing licenses impact end users on a larger scale, it's also a communication issue from the manufacturers. This won't do them any good, as customers will be annoyed from the bad user experience. Even if one in 100 customers switches the brand, they make a loss.
Force them all into 480p video and link them back to the information that the mfg crippled them to save a few cents.
While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
However, I'd personally accept to be able to buy my own license and enable the hardware a-la Raspberry Pi fashion.
Moreover, this is done on more expensive, business notebooks as well, which are both more expensive and used by the people who knows about this stuff.
The executives who made these decisions are not the most informed or the most brilliant, I assume.
[0]: https://via-la.com/licensing-programs/hevc-vvc/#license-fees
> While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
Not for HP or Dell. Maybe I've been working in BigTech for too long, but I can't even count that low anymore. $25M is a rounding error for most major product lines I've worked on in the past decade. But, then again, every hardware producing team I've worked on had this exact penny-pinching attitude on BOM cost. They'd throw away $25M opex like it's nothing, but spend $0.25 extra on the BOM?? Never!!!
I mean if the laptop cost $300 (feels like a very conservative estimate) providing HEVC would cost them. Lets see here... 1% would be $3, 0.33% would be $1, and the price per consumer of including the functionality would be a quarter of that, 0.0825% of the cost -- roughly a tenth of a percent.
What is the value (to the company) of the consumer saving 25c on the purchase price and then having such a godawful experience with the product that they say "I would never buy this again, nor ever tell anyone else to buy it"
The company very much doesn't want the customer to know that it spent $20 of the customer's money in wasted productivity to save itself 25 cents
Nokia has a legal complaint [1] against HP related to H.264 and H.265 filed October 2023. It even mentions H.265 on consumer devices being an infringement. I sort of doubt this is about paying $0.04 more per laptop - there must be some uncertainty or legal risk maybe in certain chipsets or something.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...
AFAIK, using linux instead if windows fixes the problem.
On linux getting hw decode to actually work in the first place can be a challenge, especially in browsers.
And if you decide to buy the extension from Microsoft (i.e. pay for the license yourself) on you Windows 11 machine, you are (in Microsoft's great QA fashion) greeted with:
> Play High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) videos in any video app on your Windows 10 device. These extensions are designed to take advantage of hardware capabilities on some newer devices— including those with an Intel 7th Generation Core processor and newer GPU to support 4K and Ultra HD content. For devices that don’t have hardware support for HEVC videos, software support is provided, but the playback experience might vary based on the video resolution and PC performance. These extensions also let you encode HEVC content on devices that don’t have a hardware-based video encoder.
Yes, Windows 10.
> https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-US&gl=U...
For the first device mentioned it has a discrete Nvidia GPU which also supports HEVC encode/decode in hardware, which I assume is also disabled?
Possibly in dell's customized drivers, OEM would have it.
It's like those cars where you pay a subscription to use the heated seats.
Relevant username
Would be more acceptable if it was possible to pay $0.24 to enable it.
You can, you need to buy a codec from the Microsoft store for $1 or local equivalent. Most people won't know this.
Not even that, you just need to know the "hidden" link to the codecs, then it's free. I'm sure Microsoft is well aware of these links, there are many articles about them.
At best it will give only software decoding.
Does the codec enable the hardware support?
Having the feature > being able to buy it > being completely locked out of > have to subscribe to a recurring payment.
Pretending that this about taking a stand against patent holders of HEVC is absurd. HP and Dell clearly see the writing on the wall. PCs are a mature technology now—my 10 year old i7 6700k runs AAA games from this year fluently (albeit with an updated GPU). A laptop bought in 2025 should be entirely adequate for virtually any business task for a decade barring wear and tear or an entirely new software paradigm.
Nothing new from Dell. Even their screws are cheap. Soon, they resort to using toothpick to hold their computer cases together.
I've been working with Intel to fix an issue in recent GPU drivers that prevents HEVC playback from working and I believe that's the real issue here rather than the licensing conclusion that this article jumps to.
How much relevant is HEVC on computers? I encounter H.264, VP9 and AV1 and that is pretty much all. I know HEVC is used on Blu-ray and in DVB-T, but that is usually played by dedicated hardware, not PC.
Many things that used to be h.264 are now using h.265 (hevc). Without this license a lot of applications can't play hevc at all, they rely on the codecs included in windows (which are unavailable without a license). They either fall back to another codec, or stop working. The article mentioned issues with videos playback in browsers and issues with ms teams.
Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.
Video calls and some live streamings. Steam Remote Play (together), Sunshine/Moonlight and Parsec for gaming where you can easily check the client's capabilities and go with whatever is best. Discord also does similar for video calls I believe. Steams newer game recording feature also only supports h264/h265 with no AV1 support.
It's not that relevant for video conferencing, most apps are still either doing H264, VP8 or VP9 and jumping to AV1 directly.
And for video streaming, AV1 is becoming increasingly used on Youtube and Netflix for example ( https://aomedia.org/av1-adoption-showcase/netflix-story/ )/.
It is used a lot more for people who don't have to worry too much about licensing at scale, such as pirate content or local streaming (quite often backed by an OS wide license). Doing a quick search on various pirate content search engine, I can see a lot of AV1 content now, so it'll eventually get more popular!
I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible
HEVC is pretty much a straight improvement over h264. Same quality, much smaller file sizes, and it's actually got HW decode supported in most integrated GPUs unlike av1. I've been converting all my h264 stuff, saves a lot of space on my disks.
You can also go with VP9 which is pretty much on par with HEVC
If you’re watching streaming content in 4K, most of that is streamed in HEVC. Also, any phones that record video typically do so in HEVC by default.
Not sure on computers, but video recorded with your phone camera is probably using HEVC.
And while phones usually have a hardware AV1 decoder, they probably don't have an AV1 encoder.
For recording video on phones, there is h.264, and the relatively newer, better option HEVC.
Thus much of peoples' photo library is becoming HEVC.
I'm assuming it's being disabled in firmware. Is there a way to re-enable it? Can the firmware be downgraded?
Maybe I'm reading between lines, but isn't it ridiculous to talk about license prices when the affected machines are $900 pro laptops?
I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.
Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
>$5 worse experience
lets all calm down, its about h.265 nobody sane uses anyway
Looks at folder on ZFS array with ~16TB of video files, at least half of which by bytes-stored are h.265
Haha, yeah. Haha. Nobody sane.
Sweats
Yeah, just because some data hoarder on the internet has TBs of videos doesn't mean that's normal. So weird call out.
It is however a call out of the GP as well for not knowing how ubiquitous something can be while not being shoved in your face that it is being used. The GP is evidently unaware that most streaming services will offer an h.265 encode for those users that can use it as the bandwidth savings make it very worthwhile. Mobile devices are using HEVC by default now as well as at least iOS using a still image variant. From reading elsewhere in these comments, clearly MS Teams uses it as well.
So just because you don't know it is being used does not mean it is not being used the way you might think.
Literally every decent video application uses h.265. What are you even talking about?
Is this some Linux bigot thing?
no. youtube and netflix both use h264+av1 as their codec options. Netflix seems to use x265 for a small subset (but it's somewhat unclear).
That's incorrect.
Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#:~:t...
Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.
youtube has never and will never come to support x265 they even tried to block support from chrome becuase they hate it that much they support x264,vp8/vp9, av1 and soon av2 they literally started and entire organisation to take on mpeg called aomedia
Ahh. You're right, sort of.
Users can choose h265 for live streams and they allow hevc uploads, but they then transcode it to worse codecs before broadcast.
I wonder how they would save on bandwidth by switching to hevc? I think its something like 40% more efficient on average.
I guess av1 is even better, but what percentage of hardware supports it?
> what percentage of hardware supports it?
Pretty much everything modern except Apple. Intel since 11th gen (2021), AMD since Zen4 (2022), Samsung phones since 2021, Google phones since 2021, Mediatek since 2020.
With modern lifecycles the way they are, that's probably ~60-80% of everything out there.
Also software decoding works just fine.
Thanks! I guess I have some catching up to do.
Kind of. But where does it stop. Looking at a 24 cent license in isolation does sound silly. But what about when you add up Windows, h265, h264, mp3, aac, HDMI, ... You can't throw in every single feature into a laptop because it is cheap individually. Eventually they add up. Not to mention that in addition to per-unit fees lots of these have required memberships and certification which may add up, especially on lower volume products.
IMHO the fact that this wasn't visible on any product page was pretty awful, especially when this was a near globally included feature before. Maybe in an ideal world the customer would be able to pick which licenses they want individually when purchasing the device (or add them on at a later time). But that is beyond the knowledge of most consumers and has other downsides.
So while I do consider this choice to be pretty silly. I do find it hard to draw the line of at what point it is clearly ridiculous.
I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but ruin your user experience?
It's like Samsung uses faulty "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor on some of the cheaper phones (including S series FE phones) which results in butt dialing: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/o56uz4/s20_fe_pock... -- seriously, is this the place they need to be frugal?
Or, although this is a matter of more than a few dollars -- all ThinkPad T series screens are terrible with low brightness and 45% NTSC color range, unless your IT department is nice enough to purchase a version with upgraded screen, which is almost guaranteed to never happen.
I used to like to hate on Apple, but these days, I appreciate how they don't cheap out on things so that user never needs to double check a specific thing in the spec sheet and deal with the mess.
>I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but
>ruin your user experience?
How? Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
If they were approached by mpreg, I cannot blame them for choosing to disable the codecs over paying the racket.
I just wish they made a public statement about it at the time, and were loud about it in their product pages, rather than customers having to find out in this manner.
Name and shame, and recommend customers to use AOM codecs, rather than silently handle it.
VP8 was never competitive with H.264 – like WebP the apparent savings was due to lowering detail by double-encoding. Since people care about battery life / fan noise it only made sense if you were running a huge operation with the infrastructure to encode variants for niche combinations as well as the mainstream devices.
VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.
> Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
Like everything? Its objectively better in every way.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, RDP, Teams, etc...
You'll note that Zoom and Webex aren't listed which is why Teams provides sharper screen sharing with less bandwidth. Its likely they also didn't want to pay the shiny nickel to have happier users.
EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
As far as I am aware, Netflix, like youtube, use AOM codecs.
>EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
Is Bluray actually relevant today?
> As far as I am aware, Netflix, like youtube, use AOM codecs.
That is incorrect. Youtube chooses the best available automatically. Unless you have a slow network or obsolete device you're probably getting h.265.
Netflix defaults to h265 for their own content because they want it to look good. They let licensed content use the cheaper AOM codecs because they don't care how it looks.
Blu ray is still relevant, especially 4k UHD Blu Ray. It is still the only way to watch most films in decent quality. Streaming services average a bitrate of 8-16 Mbps. A few top out over 35. A 4k UHD Blu Ray averages around 80-130Mbps.
Try watching a horror film on any streaming service. Notice the blocks in the background of dark scenes where the various black levels dither into each other? That's called macroblocking and you'll get it with most/all streaming services because they're low quality. It's not a natural and normal part of the scene. You won't get that with blu ray.
People with large screens, or folks that are just very sensitive to it will always prefer the disk.
For whatever reason I can't edit the comment above, but I wanted to say for the record that I was wrong about Youtube.
You can only edit comments for two hours after you post them.
Your phone likely records videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years). If you want to watch your own videos on a PC, you'll have to deal with the codec.
That's something to begin with.
>Your phone likely is recording videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years).
Checked. Seems to be h264+aac.
Arguably not a recent phone (OnePlus 3), although I feel no pressure to upgrade.
The current plan is to wait for first Google Pixel using RISC-V. Next year I would say it's fifty-fifty chance, informed by the switch to PowerVR GPU this year on their SoC, and next years expected general availability of RVA23 cores.
Really?
Ah well. No HP and Dell laptops then. So long!
In other news, Lenovo reports record quarterly earnings due to a sudden increase in corporate purchases.