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

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[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 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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[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 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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[–] gerowen@lemmy.world 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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