does dell/hp have to pay annual license fees in perpetuity for systems they sell???
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.
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
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.”
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?
Americans have no consumer protections.
Why would they when capitalists are more important than the consumers.
How is this done? Can you just re-enable the feature in the BIOS? And what about machines sold outside the US?
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
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.
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 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.
Nah, that’s an NPU.
I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.
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
Imagine buying a “Pro” laptop that can’t even play HEVC videos without software transcoding. This is insane penny pinching and infuriating
He’s usually right.
*On software. For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or eating habits
Or plants. Or whether you should shout at people. Or sort of the concept of women.
Or eating toe funk
Ugh, there’s a Google search I’m happy not to do.
Don’t bother. It’s shit taken out of context and overblown. Guy is a massive autist and he made some statements regarding freedom. Since then he corrected most of his statements that caused controversy with more empathy. All this without ever blaming it on his autism.
Our hero.
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.
“license cost” is a stupid problem to have in the first place. adopt a foss standard, why won’t this get through to these thick skulled morons.
Well, hevc already is a standard. It’s too late now. AV1 will need some time until it’s widely adopted.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NMZLZ57R3T7
You can still buy it yourself. It’s only $1.
deleted by creator
synology also did this recently. shit should be illegal.
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.
that was the final straw for me to switch NAS vendors when I next upgrade.
What should be illegal is patents like this!
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.
I wonder what they spent paying people to implement and communicate this change.
At 600k for a company that size this cost them more money than just paying the extra 4 cents.
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
Revenue wouldn’t change from this, only expenses and profit.
Yeah, I was just riffing from the other post but you’re right, that’s not how that works.
Fair enough
Someone was a doing a lot of hard work subtracting big scary numbers in their budget sheet.
