So, yeah, HP and Dell are fucked - by what you may ask? Why, AI of course, because it's hiked memory prices so far up it's eating up their profit margins. They might be doomed.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Can't current CPUs decode it in real time?
Yeah, because of the ASICs built into them to enable that decoding.
Without that, a 4K HEVC video is in upwards of 100+ billion operations/s to decode on the CPU. Which limits you to high end CPUs getting capped out on something you essentially get for "free" otherwise
I meant without dedicated circuits, obviously. Can't it be parallelised? Many cpus have a lot of relatively idle cores at a given time...
I remember that my 486 had trouble with mp3 files, but soon enough, I got a new machine with many more spare cycles.
That is parallelized... I didn't make mention of threading being the concern here.
The 100+ billion operations per second isn't exactly easy.
4k 60fps = 498 million pixels per second
Each pixel takes a couple hundred logical operations with HEVC.
A modern high end 4GHz, 8 physical core CPU at 4 instructions per cycle, at maximum capacity, can handle 128 billion operations per second.
You probably wouldn't even get your realtime framerate in this scenario.
Kinda makes me even more glad I've been migrating all my stuff over to AV1/OPUS.
So in this case, even if your hardware was impacted by this, if you tried to play a H.265 (HEVC) file within Windows, it would play, but will software encode / decode. What if you are playing something through a client like VLC or Jellyfin Media Player? Prior to this change, would Jellyfin report Direct Playing (using iGPU) and now it will be forced to transcode on the server side, and VLC would still use the CPU for encoding and decoding, since there is no server to do it for you?
"Direct playing" just means the source file is entirely compatible with the client device and doesn't require any transcoding/re-encoding by the server, it doesn't really tell you whether the client is using software or hardware decoding to play it. I'm guessing it's probable that a Jellyfin server could still report "direct playing" even if the client is using software decoding to play it. However, if the client device is something like a smart TV or something with a more locked down OS, and the maintainer/manufacturer removes support for a codec from that device, you may show more transcoding action on your server for things that previously just direct played because smart devices like that may not have support for software decoding, or may not have the horsepower to try even if they still have the codecs installed.
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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.
Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.
The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.
They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it's become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.
HEIC is hated because nobody knows what to do with it. Apple devices use it. That’s it.
Nobody knows what to do with it because it's proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn't use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn't use it for anything ever.
If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn't be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.
Actually come to think of it I'm kind of surprised Google doesn't do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default...
Google does all the same evil shit apple does and nerfs it just enough to spin a good image. They are not your friend.
Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the 'Don't be evil' era, but that era is long past.
They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.
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
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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.
That's reasonable, people deserve to get paid for their labor. In this situation however, the difference between them is that DisplayPort is a royalty free VESA standard. So while manufacturers have to pay for the materials and such to include it in their devices, they don't have to pay any additional fees to license the standard. HDMI on the other-hand is a "brand" of proprietary connector/interface (kind of like how "Velcro" isn't the actual name of a product, it's a "brand" of hook and pile tape), so not only do manufacturers have to pay for the materials and labor related to physically acquiring and installing the connectors, but they have to pay both per-device and annual licensing fees for rights to use the HDMI product.
has to pay a per-device licensing fee.
Where I'm confused, is that it would be a perpertual/long term annual license fee per device. It would make sense to have a one time fee per device shipped. That would not affect older models.
I guess what is happening is that manufacturers can stop paying for the capabilities by "downgrading" their driver support, and it affects old and new systems the same when users "update"?
The headline is a little misleading.
As I understand it, they haven't retroactively removed the HEVC capability from any devices that already shipped with it enabled.
Rather, they have stopped including it in new ones of the same model or in certain new models, even though those machines still have CPUs which have the capability built in for it.
This has resulted in e.g. businesses buying a laptop which works fine for conference calls and other stuff, then buying another laptop the "exact same" and suddenly it's nerfed.
H.265 is not a royalty free standard like AV1, VP9, Theora, etc. It's covered by proprietary patents held by groups like MPEG LA so in order for manufacturers to build hardware level support for it into their devices they have to pay whatever the then current royalty fees are to those patent holders.
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So the hardware is capable, but refuses to work until someone pays for the licensing cost. Yay capitalism bringing innovation!
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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.
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