This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They are disabling it because the license cost went up 4 cents? Just pass that cost onto the customer. Even if they mark that up several times, I would rather pay that than have my battery drained because I have to software decode a video.
There is still a lot of H.265 content out there. I have many terabytes of it that I don't want to transcode.
synology also did this recently. shit should be illegal.
that was the final straw for me to switch NAS vendors when I next upgrade.
What should be illegal is patents like this!
From the article:
Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”
Well, not anymore lol.
He's usually right.
*On software. For the love of god don't follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or plants. Or whether you should shout at people. Or sort of the concept of women.
For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or eating habits
Let me get this straight - people buy a product advertised as having a feature, containing a part also advertised as having that feature, and then they disable it after purchase?
How is that legal?
No, they disable it before purchase, existing laptops still have the feature. Only the newer ones so they won't have to pay the royalties from next year. But still an anti consumer move as nobody will notice until it's too late for a refund. Normal people will never understand why their $200 phone can smoothly play h265 videos while their $1500 laptop is struggling with that. Everyone will assume that because hardware support is included in the cheapest processors from even a decade ago, it will still be present in the latest and greatest laptops from hp
Yes this is absolutely ridiculous.
This is also a good reason to avoid proprietary codecs. H.265 may be a great codec, but the licensing fees are basically a tax on the world.
The best solution would be an overall switch to AV1. But silicon support for that is not nearly as widespread.
Yeah that’s going to change fucking fast. My game streaming service I build from older parts to cut costs has 1 shiney modern part because of AV1. Just AV1. Nothing else influenced the purchase of that part.
And there is no way a big company made that part just for me.
Imagine buying a "Pro" laptop that can't even play HEVC videos without software transcoding. This is insane penny pinching and infuriating
I don't for a second believe this is about the rising cost. It raised by $0.04. Someone below said that works out to a savings of $600,000.
Alright, but for an individual, it's $0.04.
Just increase the final price by $0.25. You made back your $600,000. Plus whatever $0.21 would equate to as GAINS.
Fuck guys. You suck at business. This is what happens when companies replace their CEO with AI.
The real key is buried in the middle, where they say hardware decode capabilities are going to be restricted to models with discrete GPUs... Meaning they can make a $500 upsell mandatory for the most basic of capabilities.
Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn't a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?
There's NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.
The HP 16" EliteBook 665 G11 Notebook costs $1500. That means this $600k "cost cutting" measure starts to decrease revenue if only 400 people buy a laptop from a different brand.
Or even a single person. Someone tasked to purchase 400 laptops for a company, reads this news and decides to get ThinkPads instead...
Sell the CEO private jet if they really need the money
So the hardware is capable, but refuses to work until someone pays for the licensing cost. Yay capitalism bringing innovation!
It’s interesting how the tone of innovation changes. It starts out like “hey, I can do that better than my competitors!” and that’s all fine, doing something better creating market demand and cash influx. But eventually, the innovation looks for shortcuts… enshitification is the word. Cheaper parts, smaller quantities, subscriptions to hardware you buy but never own… There’s a shift from product/service innovation as means to financial growth to purely financially incentivized innovation.
It reminds me of Marx’s idea that concentration of capital naturally leads to the prominence of financial markets, an indicator of a capitalist economy reaching its “advanced” / crisis-prone phase. The similarity being: there’s an economic shift from industrial investment as means to financial growth to purely financial investment.
increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops
“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine
I wonder how long the list of these fees for one machine is
That's about a $600,000 savings for that quarter, for a company that reported $13.9 billion in revenue for Q3 2025.
It would be cruel of us to ask them to only have $13,899,400,000 in revenue that quarter instead of $13,900,000,000
Someone was a doing a lot of hard work subtracting big scary numbers in their budget sheet.
Is it disabled in hardware, firmware or software? Does Linux enable it?
Reading through a bit it sounds like it works on Linux, not on Windows. Folks are hypothesizing it’s disabled at the ACPI level because different drivers don’t help.
does dell/hp have to pay annual license fees in perpetuity for systems they sell????
H.265 (HEVC) is not a free (as in freedom) codec, so yes. You as an individual consumer can use things like Handbrake to encode H.265 video for your personal use, probably using the free x265 software encoder, but in order for a device like your phone, camera, TV, laptop, etc. to have hardware accelerated encoding or decoding, the manufacturer has to pay a licensing fee.
This is true of lots of proprietary technologies. HDMI is another one. In order for a device to ship with an HDMI port (as opposed to Displayport), the manufacturer has to pay a per-device licensing fee.
To be fair, I think it is okay to ask for a one-time fee for something you've developed. You want to use this $tech that I made? Sure, pay me 10 ct for every device you put it in.
Dumb of HP and Dell to not eat the cost. Just in the future never support VVC. HEVC is well enough a thing already. Push defaults to be AV1 and then in like 5-7 years, AV2. I use AV1 for everything I can. Computer supports it. My phone does not but edits I do on my PC will be encoded to AV1. Photos, support JPEG-XL but in the interim, AVIF. Screw apple for going with HEIC. I highly doubt that there will be a successor to UHD Blu-Rays to adopt VVC. No big reason to jump to 8k. Only good would be higher bitrates/better compression and audio.
Films are mostly recorded digitally with 4k-6k cameras or a limited amount of 35mm still going on that scans well to around 4k. 8K digital cinema cameras are becoming more common but the 4k-6k ones are dominant and 70mm is expensive and uncommon. Plus significant digital effects are prevalent on even low action movies, non-sci-fi. Those are still going to have been mostly done and mastered for 4k. Another round of remastering required for 8k content where digital or 70mm film masters exists. Dinosaur broadcasters may choose VVC the shrinking world population watching dinosaur broadcasters. AV1 is increasingly the present and AV2 will be the future. VVC will be end of line because of short sighted greed
It's clearly a move to make torrent for movies unviable and get funding from Netflix.
Not until you pull the handbrake at least
i use x265 for EVERYTHING. i had no clue about this.
fuck.
webm? lol
webm is a container, not a codec
Even if you hit that blocker, you can still software-decode with [alternative] software.
AV1
How is this done? Can you just re-enable the feature in the BIOS? And what about machines sold outside the US?
Is that a hardware or software issue? I.e. is it caused by the windows driver for these laptops' graphic units?
Does HEVC work with the Linux drivers on these machines?
No, it’s a licensing issue. H.265 hardware support requires an ongoing license. And HP+Dell don’t want to continue paying licensing fees for PCs they have already sold. So they’re telling customers “get fucked, use a media player with software decoding instead of using hardware acceleration directly in your browser.”
Kinda makes me even more glad I've been migrating all my stuff over to AV1/OPUS.
