HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops' CPUs

Note that it's not a $0.24 increase Dell and HP are upset over, its an increase of $0.04. The price they were paying was $0.20.

So if you have a Dell or HP laptop, you're hardware acceleration is because your experience with the hardware isn't worth $0.04 to the OEM.

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...?

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.

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.

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?

That will be someone elses area

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.

Does MS Teams actually use HEVC rather than VP9 or AV1?

If so, time for customers to complain to Microsoft.

> In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together.

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.

Until AV3 finally rolls around, of course. Then the world would be just H.264 as baseline and AV3 for high quality.

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.

It’s not without precedent.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...

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.

Just like the embedded GPU in a CPU needs a driver to work, the embedded video decoder/encoder also needs a driver.

I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible

For recording video on phones, there is h.264, and the relatively newer, better option HEVC.

Thus much of peoples' photo library is becoming HEVC.

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...

Yes it should work with the codec pack, and they're keeping it on some of their laptops like with dedicated gpus

While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.

However, I'd personally accept to be able to buy my own license and enable the hardware a-la Raspberry Pi fashion.

Moreover, this is done on more expensive, business notebooks as well, which are both more expensive and used by the people who knows about this stuff.

The executives who made these decisions are not the most informed or the most brilliant, I assume.

[0]: https://via-la.com/licensing-programs/hevc-vvc/#license-fees

You can, you need to buy a codec from the Microsoft store for $1 or local equivalent. Most people won't know this.

Having the feature > being able to buy it > being completely locked out of > have to subscribe to a recurring payment.

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