HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs
31 points by xvello
31 points by xvello
The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.
(emphasis mine). Really?? kneecapping laptops over $0.04 per unit. I get they have economies of scale (increase in costs of up to $600,080 for HP & up to $406,640 for Dell, and savings of up to $3,600,480 & $2,439,840 respectively) but still that should be nothing to them? I can't imagine their margins are that tight... Though if customers end up blaming the software rather than the hardware I guess they're sitting pretty.
Can't be fun for the owners of those laptops, but long-term it sounds like a good thing to disincentivize HEVC. Ideally, you'd get a virtuous death spiral where fewer people are licensing HEVC => it's less ubiquitous => people are pushed towards less onerously licensed codecs => less reason to license it in the first place => step 1.
Frankly, this disincentivizes HP and Dell laptops more than HEVC.
No, it goes both ways . And most people don't look at the list of supported hardware accelerated video codecs when buying a laptop.
The move is about pressuring the patent owners to lower the license price, or else. If they can afford it or not, is not the point (of course they can!), it's about power.
In the first place, none of these codecs are needed.
VP8. VP9, AV1 and now AV2 exist.
There's absolutely no need for MPEG.
HP and Dell are "only" saving $5 million by not licensing patents on math from a single patent pool. There are multiple patent pools, more patent trolls are getting in on the action all the time, and they keep raising their prices. If you want to engage with them, I can understand advocating for HP and Dell to sell it as a premium option (like Microsoft does with their HEVC plugin on their app store).
However, this is very much a pro-consumer move. At this point, these trolls claim something like one patent per 13 lines of code, which doesn't include the fringe patent trolls. These patent pools are also trying to force licenses for AV1 and VVC despite having nothing to do with them. It's a never ending game of legal extortion that collectively funnels hundreds of millions of dollars out of consumer's pockets.
What does it mean by into .... CPUs? Is that a custom chip with HEVC disabled?
All the codec stuff comes as code, firmware for some custom hardware subsystem, compute shaders that come with the vendor-supplied GPU drivers, or a mixture. The easiest (and most likely) way is that they just remove the HEVC support there, or maybe they just set a flag somewhere to not expose the capability.
If they're fancy, those configuration resistors on the chip package could be tweaked, but it's already rather unlikely that Intel or AMD make that a hardware flag (i.e. toggle codec support by messing with resistors) so that Dell or HP could order a different configuration.
It won't be a custom chip run, too expensive.
Configuration resistors haven't been a thing for many years. Modern CPUs have many thousands of one-time configuration fuse bits built into the silicon, and they can be blown even after the chip is sold. Intel could easily provide chips with the feature disabled, or a tool/microcode to permanently disable it to OEMs. Almost every hardware feature can be disabled this way.
For example, simply installing an AMD EPYC CPU in some Dell servers will permanently lock the CPU to Dell systems by burning Dell's public secure boot key into CPU fuses.
I'd put the efuses in the resistors part of my post though, ie. unlikely that they approach it that way.
Dell and HP might end up wanting to sell a way-overpriced HEVC-support package (with less technobabble: The "Zoom performance option", perhaps?) and it would be a shame if the fuse prevents that.
If it's just some crap that the firmware signals to the OS' driver somehow (UEFI's authenticated variables, something in ACPI, whatever), they could solve that with a firmware update and a Microsoft Store app.
From the discussion on the orange site I gathered this is a driver issue, not firmware or hardware. It might work if you install the intel drivers, tho it might be an upstream issue. Several people report it works on Linux but not on Windows.
Will existing machines get firmware updates to disable this? Or is it only for new machines?
The HEVC license is paid once per device by it's manufacturer. After the device has been sold, there's no savings to be had by disabling the capability (unless they didn't pay the license, but it does not seem to be the case). One should then assume that there won't be a regression on older devices.
But I hate living in a timeline where we have to consider that possibility.
Yup. As some one who loves technology I'm like "Cool! OTA updates to my chips! We live in the future!" and it's all fun and games until they brick your car because you don't pay the subscription and you don't actually own your car, amirite.