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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.
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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
I’m actually not too mad at HP/Dell for this one. This type of licencing is bullshit anyway. It would be real nice if everyone (on software and hardware side) simply stopped supporting these proprietary codecs altogether and moved to open standards.
Yeah, the licensing is BS but couldn’t they just tack on like 40 cents to the price or whatever? For a $900+ machine, it wouldn’t even be a rounding error.
Open codecs are better, yeah, but artificially crippling existing media workflows is kind of a dick move, IMO.
There’s really no way to force change without somebody being a dick. The vast majority of people are barely aware that codecs are a thing, let alone know how the licencing situation works. If it’s not the hardware vendors that push back, the status quo will go on forever.
Well they could not be dicks and fund and support open alternatives.
However this is just greedy corporations being greedy at the expenses of their customers.
The funding and support is not really the issue at the moment; it’s getting the whole industry to change course that needs to happen. None of that will happen if everyone just goes along with the status quo. History is littered with technologies that failed, not because they were worse, but because the inferior option was there first, and nothing broke that technological momentum.