Tech giants Dell and HP have begun shipping some of their budget-friendly PCs with disabled hardware decoding capabilities for HEVC/H.265 videos. This move is reportedly aimed at reducing costs, as patent holders are increasing licensing fees in the short term.
The vast majority of these affected PCs are business-oriented entry-level or mainstream machines. However, high-end offerings with premium displays and advanced features still come equipped with all the features activated.
Dell and HP have confirmed that some laptops, including their ‘standard and base systems,’ as well as certain HP models like EliteBook and ProBook 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 laptops, feature disabled support for hardware decoding of HEVC/H.265 videos.
The companies are trying to cut costs by avoiding royalty payments to patent holders. The total savings amount to tens of millions of dollars per year.
However, this decision comes at the expense of users who may need to rely on third-party software or alternative codecs like AV1, which is more efficient but also consumes more computational resources.
While discrete and integrated GPUs support hardware decoding of HEVC/H.265 videos, OEMs must pay patent pools as well. If they do not pay royalty fees, they must disable the capability on the software (by modifying drivers) or firmware level.
Users may find it difficult to re-enable disabled hardware decoding capabilities due to the lack of generic drivers from AMD, Intel, or Nvidia, and even third-party players cannot add it back in.
Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/dell-and-hp-disable-hardware-h-265-decoding-on-select-pcs-due-to-rising-royalty-costs-companies-could-save-big-on-hevc-royalties-but-at-the-expense-of-users