HP and Dell Disable HEVC Support Built Into Their Laptops' CPUs (arstechnica.com) 105
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines' inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.
HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF]. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors.
A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support."
Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."
HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF]. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors.
A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support."
Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."
Good products (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good products (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering they aren't going out of their way to disable the encoder itself.
> Nokia sued HP and Amazon in October 2023 in multiple countries such as USA, UK and more for violating H.264/H.265 patents
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-hp-inc/
Patents on HEVC won't be clear until like 2030. Modes for VR won't expire until like 2050
Re:Good products (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Good products (Score:2)
HP and Dell (and other manufacturers) want to make products at different price points. $5 here and $5 there adds up to real money. It is neither right or wrong, assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront. One does not buy RyanAir expecting a lay flat international first class.
This is not a new phenomenon. IBM mainframes have had the feature where
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Re: Good products (Score:5, Insightful)
It is neither right or wrong
It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.
assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront.
If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.
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Even if it is in the largest font size, is the average person even going to understand what the ramifications are?
No, but it would let people who care know, and it would let people who potentially care google and find out.
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Even if it is in the largest font size, is the average person even going to understand what the ramifications are? Does the average consumer even know what HECV is?
Despite the fact that they don't know the specifics, the specific processor in these laptops has lower value than an unmodified processor of that model number. If the consumer looks it up and finds a rating, the version in the laptop will not be as good as what they've read. Arguably the vendor shouldn't be able to call it an Intel 268v because equal to that product anymore; it should be called modified Intel 268v, so at least the user can look up how exactly it has been modified, or not buy it if they real
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Some people fly RyanAir simply because it's the only carrier covering their route.
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Analogy to BMW Subscription Heated Seats. (Score:2)
...re trying to make so forgive me if I am out to lunch, but this matters naught to the consumer. This is just back-office dealings that either adds $5 to the cost of a laptop or doesn't. It's there vendors choice what licenses they pay or don't pay. Then they get to set the price on their laptop after it all shapes out.
If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.
BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.
Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn
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If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you... it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.
But if you agreed to that spec when you bought it, isn't that on you? The real problem here is that in these laptops the processor is sold as an "Intel 268v", not a "nerfed Intel 268v" or a "low performance video Intel 268v".
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A good example of this market mechanism occurred recently with lithium battery tech. Lithium-Cobalt (3.6 Volt per cell) classed chemistries have reigned since their commercialisation in the 1990's. I don't know it's patent history.
In the early 2000's a far more rugged chemistry (One that doesn't spontaneously combust) classed as Lithium-Phosphate (3.2 Volt per cell) was developed and heavily patented. It never gained any popularity until just recently - Immediately following the expiry of the patents.
Re: Good products (Score:2)
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If I myself buy a CPU with hardware HEVC decoding and build a computer with it and use it to play videos, will the MPEG licensing mafia come to sue me?
CPU manufacturers should've never included support for any features peddled by licensing mafias.
Re: Good products (Score:2)
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I'm sure soon enough you'll get HEVC enablers in the Windows Store where you can pay $5 and enable hardware HEVC decode.
But it's likely not a huge issue - HEVC would only apply for 4K videos, and web videos are using either h.264 or AV1. Some streaming services are using HEVC, but the patent issues have generally steered them to using h.264
HEVC is generally reserved only for Blu-Ray playback, and since UHD Blu-Ray is not possible on PCs anymore, it's basically relatively useless. Everyone else uses h.264 or
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That's sort of not relevant is it? Neither HP nor Dell actually made these encoders in these devices. They are made by Intel and part of the iGPU. If anyone has license concerns it's Intel.
Now there may be a reason why they won't ship a licence for specific software but HP don't provide the browser or media decoders either, so in theory the hardware decoder should be available to anyone either through open source software or via Microsoft (sidenote: Do you still need to buy the HEVC Video Extensions from th
Re:Good products (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like double/triple dipping.
Cross license with Intel/AMD and get paid per cpu sold.
Cross License with Microsoft and get paid per windows copy sold for the software decode.
And criss license with all of the OEM hardware makers and get paid yet again for each machine sold that can decode in hw.
Great for Nokia to double and triple dip and get paid 3 times for the exact same users. This really indicates we have a royally screwed up patent system.
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This isn't double/tripple dipping. It's more like 5 to 6 times dipping because you forget that they take license fees for encoders too.
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It seems like double/triple dipping.
Cross license with Intel/AMD and get paid per cpu sold.
Cross License with Microsoft and get paid per windows copy sold for the software decode.
And criss license with all of the OEM hardware makers and get paid yet again for each machine sold that can decode in hw.
Great for Nokia to double and triple dip and get paid 3 times for the exact same users. This really indicates we have a royally screwed up patent system.
I do not know that Intel/AMD, Microsoft, and the OEM hardware makers all license the same patents.
Under the doctrine [patent exhaustion doctrine], once an authorized sale of a patented article occurs, the patent holder's exclusive rights to control the use and sale of that article are said to be "exhausted," and the purchaser is free to use or resell that article without further restraint from patent law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Neither HP nor Dell actually made these encoders in these devices. They are made by Intel and part of the iGPU. If anyone has license concerns it's Intel.
My understanding is that the hardware does not implement HEVC/H.265, but instead implements primitives which can be used to accelerate it.
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What I don't understand about all of the half-assed patent systems, is how they are allowed to sue HP and/or Amazon when the actual violator is Intel and/or AMD including the features in the graphics chip. And I would strongly suspect that Nokia has a patent sharing agreement with both Intel/AMD and so cannot sue them, so is suing all of intel's large customers. You have to love double-dipping...
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It's worse, they recommend software for encoding as well.
It's because they have to pay licence fees for HEVC. Most streaming services use AV1 now, which is free and supported.
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Re:Good products (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently it's around $4 per device. The margins are thin on their low end models, and they are greedy, so I guess $4 is too much for a feature that few people care about or will notice not being available. Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.
The real blame here is on the patent holders. AV1 is the solution for everyone else.
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and they are greedy
Bingo. I guess the companies I do buy from may be greedy too, but so far they have at least been able to hide how it affects the consumer.
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Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding
...or decoding...
will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.
You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?
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Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.
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Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.
You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.
Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.
Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.
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20 Cents (Score:2)
The HEVC licensing fee is $0.20 per device, and in 2026 it’s increasing to $0.24.
https://www.osnews.com/story/1... [osnews.com]
Re:Good products (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's a licensing fee for HEVC then it's understandable that they disable it.
The reason is that the competition on bulk corporate computers is very tough - corporations always tries to get the cheapest possible computer that will run the office package decently. They don't care about collateral damage like not all videos are viewable because you shouldn't watch videos at work.
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I see that you haven't worked with/against corporate purchasing decision.
If a corporation buys 5 it doesn't matter, but when they purchase 5000 it matters.
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You haven't worked for a large corporation.
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If there's a licensing fee for HEVC then it's understandable that they disable it.
SO MANY posts excusing this behavior because of the licensing fee BS! Wow! Anyway...
Let's go with that and say that's a fine reason to disable HEVC. Should they not offer the ability to re-enable it for said fee!?!?!?
IMHO, it should be required to do one or the other:
A) Ship it enabled. Eat the cost or include it in the purchase price if needed, but ship with the features the hardware has.
B) Ship disabled, but include options to re-enable it, possibly for a fee. Ensure users can actually make use of the har
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IMHO, this behaviour is good and is in the best interest of society.
Inconvenience enough users who just want to watch videos, and the content providers will eventually drop this format and switch to royalty-free ones.
Re: Good products (Score:2)
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I think there is some confusion here. They don't seem to have disabled it on older chips, only on new laptops, before sale, where AV1 is supported.
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Sounds like they're also recommending people purchase more expensive HW products to get that feature -- or have it enabled. So the answer is - as usual: greed.
"HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software.
Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:5, Informative)
This is standard issue shit tier clickbait that answers the question begged in the topic and the beginning of the article at the very end of the article:
Quoting from the last part of the article:
While HP’s and Dell’s reps didn’t explain the companies’ motives, it’s possible that the OEMs are looking to minimize costs, since OEMs may pay some or all of the licensing fees associated with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support, as well as some or all of the royalties per the number of devices that they sell with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support [PDF]. Chipmakers may take some of this burden off of OEMs, but companies don’t typically publicly disclose these terms.
The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are 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, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.
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.”
---
So in summary, the license for the codec is getting more and more expensive, and so support is simply axed to avoid paying the license.
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Re:Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:5, Insightful)
Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.
Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"
This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.
Re: Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:1)
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There's about a million of similar "please license our software" outlets out there, with similar pricing demands.
Rejecting overwhelming majority of such licensing demands is why laptops don't have an extra zero at the end of their price tag.
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So, then why do it? My guess would be that this is how they tell VIA to take their license fee and cram it. Dell and HP are major vendors. If they kill support, that could drive sites to look at other codecs. That, potentially, either kills HVEC or it kills the fee increase.
So, less a move
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Come to think of it, HVEC is a good codec, but it's hardly the latest. Shouldn't the fees go down as the product ages and becomes less valuable? If they want to raise prices, justify that by improving the product. Have they done so, or is this VIA being the company that doesn't care about its custo
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If customer cares, the solution is offered:
From Dell's statement:
>HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store
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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.”
I would call this a shit move. Essentially the only reason I'd buy a DiskStation over a cheap-o Mybook NAS or one-off USB disks plugged into the router would be for that Transcoding support. Just bc video codec support is widespread does Not mean all your playback devices support it. The whole point of
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it’s possible that the OEMs are looking to minimize costs, since OEMs may pay some or all of the licensing fees associated with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support
Then why don't they make that license fee available / payable by the customer? Windows did just that, it's why there's a 99c app in the Microsoft store called "HEVC Video Extensions". Incidentally the original Raspberry Pi did the same thing with the MPEG 2 decoder.
Completely shipping broken (by modern standards) hardware without recourse is just shit.
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There is recourse offered:
From Dell's statement:
>HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store
and will an paided bios update show soon to get it (Score:2)
and will an paided bios update show soon to get it back for an low cost of $49.99?
Media patents are still a problem? (Score:3)
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Still? My friend the world is actively trying to create new problems as they go. It's why some companies were pushing the MQA standard in Audio, it had licensing terms that would make even MPEG-LA say "Daaaaamn!"
Someone will find a way (Score:2)
If the chip as the hardware capability to decode it, then it's just a matter of finding how to turn it back on. Patched firmware, hardware pin or a hidden system call somewhere. Sooner or later someone will find it. There's no limits to what can be achieved when you piss of bunch of nerds with a lot of time on their hands and a taste for vengeance.
How disabled is disabled? (Score:2)
I don't know much about firmware, so maybe somebody here can help me out. The capability is still in the CPU, but Dell and HP have disabled it. How long will it be until some bright star who understands these things writes a firmware revision to re-enable it?
I'm ancient...I recall when overclocking was an edgy, high risk activity. Not so much now. Can we look forward to a new generation of hackers who will find ways to make computer components work the way they were actually designed to?
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They're hardware vendors, so it's likely disabled in either the hardware or the firmware.
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It doesn't exactly make sense.. If it's a hardware CPU feature, then you could embed the instructions in your program.
System firmware's function is to manage BIOS components such as peripheral addons and system boot; firmware does not have control over CPU offloads or what CPU Opcodes or instructions can be found in your program code that the CPU will read from your program's memory during the fetch cycle.
The only way they could cause you troubles is if the CPU vendor has specially added some system regist
Re:How disabled is disabled? (Score:4, Insightful)
On Linux: No need, it finds the hardware and uses it.
On Windows: Well, Microsoft is probably fine with this crap move and will try to sabotage attempts.
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Yet another reason to throw Windows out the... window. I have a Dell XPS 17" that runs fine under the current Linux Mint. It didn't a few years ago when it was new (sound card wasn't detected by older kernels), but it's quite nice now. It's even got two NVME slots, so I just added a second one for Linux.
The only issues I've had so far is when I reboot from Linux it wants to start Windows (probably a BIOS problem, fixed by having Windows boot manager put up a screen) and recently the 80% battery charge limi
HP stands for Horrible Products (Score:4, Insightful)
Decades ago, this was a great company. They made analogue bench test equipment that's probably still in use. Now, not so much. Back in 2006, they hired PI to try to plant spyware on at least one reporter's computer.
Nowadays, HP - not even once.
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Yep. That has happened to a lot of companies that were originally lead by engineers.
A few clarifications (Score:5, Informative)
1.) DELL and HP-ink* DID NOT kill codec support retroactively. Unlike Synology (also mentioned in the article), who removed the codecs RETROACTIVELY FOR ALL MODELS PAST AND PRESENT, probably because they could not be arsed to keep different versions of their DSM 7.3 OS with or without the codecs depending on the HW model, and also, because the oldest models could not for the life of them keep doing the transcoding with all the extra stuff that was dumped on them form DSM 5 all the way to DSM 7.3.
2.) The thing is, if you had a DELL or HP-ink computer model XYZ-rev1 from early 2025 you had the codec, and then all of the sudden, when you buy a second computer model XYZ-rev02 from late 2025 with pretty much the same hardware, sudenly, you do not have said codecs, even if the hardware encoder/decoder is still there.This baffled some customers, and offered untold click-bait-rage potential for tech news outlets everywhere.
3.) DELL and HP-ink want to either save the price of the olive** by not paying the 24cents for the codec royalties going forward, or upsell you to a higher priced fuller featured laptop. Either way, is money in their pocket.
4.) Cue people developing scripts to re-inject support by automaticaly downloading and extracting drivers and miscelaneous files (like .inf files) from older computers from DELL and HP-ink website (or failing that, downloading them from the generic driver packs from Intel and AMD iGPU drivers), complementing them with FFMPEG 8, and making some registry and other tweaks in 3... 2... 1...
5.) Again, this is not retroactive to older models, if the laptop you bought a few quarters back had the codecs active then, it still has the codecs active now. Is models within the same series, with very similar hardware and model numbers the ones that now ship without said codecs that are causing confusion.
* A few years ago HP split into HPe (e for enterprise) for servers, networking and datacenter stuff, and HP Inc for PCs and Laptops and Printers. HP-ink is a pun.
** https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
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From what I understand, Linux doesn't care. It probes the hw, finds the capability, and uses it.
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Yep. On Linux, as soon as you get the kernel loaded and started, it takes over and uses what is there, unless you tell it not to.
Re:A few clarifications (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, ok, if you reaaaallly want to get pedantic:
The Linux kernel GPU driver will expose the VCE (AMD) engine to userspace, which is then used by mesa's implementation of VAAPI, which is then in turn used by ffmpeg to power any video application you might be using. That's for intel/AMD/nvidia.
Then you get various ARM SoC GPUs (I know of rockchip and Allwinner) which have stateless decoders [1] (available through the v4l2request API) where part of the codec is actually implemented in the kernel. ffmpeg sits
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By complying with the license terms and paying royalty for every device sold.
The thing is that the grand total number of devices sold by FFMPEG is a big fat Zero.
Artificial scarcity? (Score:2)
I.e. they want people to pay more for it, so they disable what is there and works fine on cheaper models?
I think in the EU, that would be pretty illegal. In the US, it is probably entirely fine.
Re: Artificial scarcity? (Score:2)
It's actually worse than that. VIA raised the per-unit licensing fee from $0.20 to $0.24. rather than eat the $0.04 per unit cost increase, Dell and HP disabled the codec.
Bringing the Pain? (Score:2)
It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?
If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete [wikipedia.org] with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when St
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It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?
If Nokia has a valid patent and HP paid up for years then why would they not continue to pay? Despite what you heard, HP is only disabling it on some laptops. This sounds more like a cost cutting move.
If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete [wikipedia.org] with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.
Apple added AV1 hardware decoding starting with M3 and A18 chips. AV1 hardware decoders have been on Intel GPUs since 11th generation. For AMD since Radeon 6000 series GPUs. NVidia has had it since RTX 3000 series. Encoding is another matter.
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It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, ...
There's yet another thing we should "thank" Microsoft for...
Makes life easy (Score:2)
Two vendors not to buy laptops from in the future.
Open for lawsuit (Score:2)
How to enable (Score:1)
I remember modifying the UEFI bin in a hex editor to modify something related to shared VRAM on am intel Atom netbook to install hackintosh, and then flashing it via the recovery mechanism...
Stupid idea just to save a few cents (Score:2)
Forced firmware updates that can't be rolled back (Score:2)
Should be illegal.