Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs

humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• gerowen@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • greenbelt@lemy.lol ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Do they also need to pay for VGA or DVI?

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    • SynAcker@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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”?

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    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      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 already 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.

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