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HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 27 points 11 months ago (9 children)

does dell/hp have to pay annual license fees in perpetuity for systems they sell????

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    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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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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 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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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Do they also need to pay for VGA or DVI?

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    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.

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