- > 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
- 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.
by nicolaslem
3 subcomments
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
by zaptheimpaler
0 subcomment
- 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...
- 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.
by conartist6
1 subcomments
- Force them all into 480p video and link them back to the information that the mfg crippled them to save a few cents.
- 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...
by marcodiego
1 subcomments
- AFAIK, using linux instead if windows fixes the problem.
by ZeroGravitas
1 subcomments
- 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?
by HPsquared
1 subcomments
- It's like those cars where you pay a subscription to use the heated seats.
- Would be more acceptable if it was possible to pay $0.24 to enable it.
by riversflow
0 subcomment
- 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.
by knowitnone3
0 subcomment
- Nothing new from Dell. Even their screws are cheap. Soon, they resort to using toothpick to hold their computer cases together.
by daveisfera
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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