> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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 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.
Readit News
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
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.
I get your point but wonder why av1 isn't being phased in.
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
That is their entire profit margin.
Why not both? :)
“ 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”
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.
If so, time for customers to complain to Microsoft.
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.
No, the problem is trying to use royalty-bearing formats for internet video. Royalty-free formats like AV1 avoid the problem.
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
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.
> 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.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
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.
That actually changes the whole gist.
It’s not without precedent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...
> 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
* Not sure if consortium is the right word. Racket maybe?
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.
The internet is built on royalty-free formats and protocols. Video is not special or different.
I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...
Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.
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.
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.