Well, what the world really needs are laptops with built-in HVAC support!
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.
“license cost” is a stupid problem to have in the first place. adopt a foss standard, why won’t this get through to these thick skulled morons.
Well, hevc already is a standard. It’s too late now. AV1 will need some time until it’s widely adopted.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NMZLZ57R3T7
You can still buy it yourself. It’s only $1.
Not in this case, this is the codec, but still, because it’s blocked in acpi, there’s no way to enable it again in Windows, even if you pay that dollar. Workaround: install Linux
blocked in acpi
install Linux
Huh? How could Linux solve an ACPI problem?
it ignores that and uses it anyway (according to the comments on the article, i did not test this)
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synology also did this recently. shit should be illegal.
that was the final straw for me to switch NAS vendors when I next upgrade.
What would you recommend instead? I’m about to get one.
Minisforum, beelink, aoostar and many others all make much more competitive offerings.
No in house NAS OS, but tbh I recommend just taking the plunge to learn how to install your own OS, like Linux.
I haven’t settled on anything yet. I basically just want something off-the-shelf which I can run containers on and has good version of Synology Drive. But I just migrated from Windows to Linux, and am finding this to be a sticking point. Synology Drive is available on Linux without on-demand sync. QNap supports QSync on Linux but only for Ubuntu, and it seems like manually unpacking the dev file and installing doesn’t work with latest versions. Running NextCloud on QNap might be an option.
What should be illegal is patents like this!
From the article:
Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”
Well, not anymore lol.
He’s usually right.
*On software. For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or plants. Or whether you should shout at people. Or sort of the concept of women.
Or eating toe funk
Just wait.
For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or eating habits
Ugh, there’s a Google search I’m happy not to do.
Don’t bother. It’s shit taken out of context and overblown. Guy is a massive autist and he made some statements regarding freedom. Since then he corrected most of his statements that caused controversy with more empathy. All this without ever blaming it on his autism.
Can you explain how his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality are just “some statements regarding freedom.”
I sense a lot of cult ideology with your take, similar to how how magats defend every horrible thing orange turd says.
“hE’s jUsT tRoLliNg yOu lIbTaRds”
Everyone can walk back on statements that causes them bad press, it’s how he thought those things were okay in the first place, the problem.
He is autistic, it causes commincation issues.
Everyone is susceptible this, you for example with how the previous comment said it’s from autistism and you failed to process this.
Our hero.
Never meet your heroes. Speaking from very literal experience regarding Stallman.
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?
Americans have no consumer protections.
Why would they when capitalists are more important than the consumers.
Line must go up, even if it’s a lie.
NVIDIA said line must go circle, which their CEO says means up.
a circle…like the ryzen logo. AMD! This goes deeper than we thought!
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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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.
Imagine buying a “Pro” laptop that can’t even play HEVC videos without software transcoding. This is insane penny pinching and infuriating
I don’t for a second believe this is about the rising cost. It raised by $0.04. Someone below said that works out to a savings of $600,000.
Alright, but for an individual, it’s $0.04.
Just increase the final price by $0.25. You made back your $600,000. Plus whatever $0.21 would equate to as GAINS.
Fuck guys. You suck at business. This is what happens when companies replace their CEO with AI.
The real key is buried in the middle, where they say hardware decode capabilities are going to be restricted to models with discrete GPUs… Meaning they can make a $500 upsell mandatory for the most basic of capabilities.
Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?
There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.
Nah, that’s an NPU.
I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.
The HP 16" EliteBook 665 G11 Notebook costs $1500. That means this $600k “cost cutting” measure starts to decrease revenue if only 400 people buy a laptop from a different brand.
Or even a single person. Someone tasked to purchase 400 laptops for a company, reads this news and decides to get ThinkPads instead…
Sell the CEO private jet if they really need the money
So the hardware is capable, but refuses to work until someone pays for the licensing cost. Yay capitalism bringing innovation!
It’s interesting how the tone of innovation changes. It starts out like “hey, I can do that better than my competitors!” and that’s all fine, doing something better creating market demand and cash influx. But eventually, the innovation looks for shortcuts… enshitification is the word. Cheaper parts, smaller quantities, subscriptions to hardware you buy but never own… There’s a shift from product/service innovation as means to financial growth to purely financially incentivized innovation.
It reminds me of Marx’s idea that concentration of capital naturally leads to the prominence of financial markets, an indicator of a capitalist economy reaching its “advanced” / crisis-prone phase. The similarity being: there’s an economic shift from industrial investment as means to financial growth to purely financial investment.
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
“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine
I wonder how long the list of these fees for one machine is
That’s about a $600,000 savings for that quarter, for a company that reported $13.9 billion in revenue for Q3 2025.
It would be cruel of us to ask them to only have $13,899,400,000 in revenue that quarter instead of $13,900,000,000
Revenue wouldn’t change from this, only expenses and profit.
Yeah, I was just riffing from the other post but you’re right, that’s not how that works.
Fair enough
Someone was a doing a lot of hard work subtracting big scary numbers in their budget sheet.
I wonder what they spent paying people to implement and communicate this change.
At 600k for a company that size this cost them more money than just paying the extra 4 cents.
Is it disabled in hardware, firmware or software? Does Linux enable it?
Reading through a bit it sounds like it works on Linux, not on Windows. Folks are hypothesizing it’s disabled at the ACPI level because different drivers don’t help.
Here’s two brands I’ve not touched in decades. Keeping it that way.
What have you touched recently? Asking, because my Lenovo V14 thing is fine inside, but everything mechanical is crumbling in my hands.
It might be possible for you to replace the ‘upper case / palmrest’ (top section of your laptop with the keyboard and trackpad.)
Check the manual to see, buy a generic computer repair kit with basic tools to open a laptop case, buy a set of screws in bulk from aliexpress. The screw sizes may not have to match exactly, but it depends on the screw and location.
You could try following the manual during the repair, but I found it to be cumbersome and unnecessary. I was able to replace the upper case of my laptop in less than 15 minutes by just looking at it and removing what was in the way.
My problem is mostly with the moving parts and places with screws, all the plastic there is cracked and crumbling.
So it’d be more like replacing the whole “shell”, which would make sense if I knew where one can buy that, LOL.
In the worst case? On ebay, as a “For parts/not working” model with a reasonably intact exterior. Might take a bit of patience.
You may be able to find the replacement parts on amazon or the manufacturer’s website.
Look up replacement parts for your specific model and go from there.
Lenovo V series is cheap, prefer Thinkpads, especially T series. Used Thinkpads tend to still last a long time.
HP Pavilion and Dell Inspiron or whatever are also cheap and worse quality than the cheap Lenovos IMO. HP Elitebooks were fine last I touched them, years aho. Dell Latitude too, though bad models exist
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.
Do they also need to pay for VGA or DVI?
I’m not sure about those… But I do know what they don’t have to pay extra for is DisplayPort which is far superior to Hdmi.
VGA was originally a proprietary technology developed by IBM, though it was later built upon by VESA and is now publicly documented, so while it wasn’t developed by VESA as an open standard from the get-go, it is now considered an open standard that doesn’t require any licensing fees to implement. DVI was developed by the “Digital Display Working Group” and also does not require any licensing fees, though there are licensing terms you may have to abide by and there may be some costs associated with testing and validation to ensure you meet those terms and the spec.
Dumb of HP and Dell to not eat the cost. Just in the future never support VVC. HEVC is well enough a thing already. Push defaults to be AV1 and then in like 5-7 years, AV2. I use AV1 for everything I can. Computer supports it. My phone does not but edits I do on my PC will be encoded to AV1. Photos, support JPEG-XL but in the interim, AVIF. Screw apple for going with HEIC. I highly doubt that there will be a successor to UHD Blu-Rays to adopt VVC. No big reason to jump to 8k. Only good would be higher bitrates/better compression and audio.
Films are mostly recorded digitally with 4k-6k cameras or a limited amount of 35mm still going on that scans well to around 4k. 8K digital cinema cameras are becoming more common but the 4k-6k ones are dominant and 70mm is expensive and uncommon. Plus significant digital effects are prevalent on even low action movies, non-sci-fi. Those are still going to have been mostly done and mastered for 4k. Another round of remastering required for 8k content where digital or 70mm film masters exists. Dinosaur broadcasters may choose VVC the shrinking world population watching dinosaur broadcasters. AV1 is increasingly the present and AV2 will be the future. VVC will be end of line because of short sighted greed
i use x265 for EVERYTHING. i had no clue about this.
fuck.
webm? lol
webm is a container, not a codec
Even if you hit that blocker, you can still software-decode with [alternative] software.
i clearly need to educate myself
Did you do it yet
yep, learned quite a bit about how to pirate more effectively, and how to use av1.
AV1
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No need for AI summary, I found this in two seconds as a web search.
https://getstream.io/glossary/video-codecs/
At any rate, it looks like the AI was pretty accurate this time. Cheers!
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?
In this context they think they have found ‘another’ troll. They are a troll. Trying to troll me in another thread. Takes anyone who has a negative opinion of something they post and calls them a troll. Forgot to log into the correct account when they posted a wall of links at me for calling their alts accounts link to a cpu hog news site trash.
Oh.
That’s pathetic.
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I love how to never answered what GPU you had 🤣
