HP and Dell Disable HEVC Support Built Into Their Laptops' CPUs (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180160171
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/21/0616243/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/
> Some Dell and HP laptop owners have [1]been befuddled by their machines' inability to play [2]HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have [3]built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec [4]since 2015 . However, both Dell and HP have [5]disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks .
>
> HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11
[6]PDF
, ProBook 465 G11[7]PDF
, and EliteBook 665 G11[8]PDF
. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players.HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors.
A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support."
Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."
[1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Intel-Arc-140v-HEVC-Hardware-Decoding-Not-Working-In-Browser/td-p/1717931
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding
[3] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000037112/graphics.html
[4] https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/616/amd-unveils-6th-generation-a-series-processor-bringing-unprecedented-hd-streaming-online-gaming-and-innovative-computing-experiences-to-notebooks-and-all-in-ones
[5] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/
[6] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ProBook-460-G11.pdf
[7] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ProBook-465-G11.pdf
[8] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/EliteBook-665-G11.pdf
Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:5, Informative)
This is standard issue shit tier clickbait that answers the question begged in the topic and the beginning of the article at the very end of the article:
Quoting from the last part of the article:
While HP’s and Dell’s reps didn’t explain the companies’ motives, it’s possible that the OEMs are looking to minimize costs, since OEMs may pay some or all of the licensing fees associated with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support, as well as some or all of the royalties per the number of devices that they sell with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support [PDF]. Chipmakers may take some of this burden off of OEMs, but companies don’t typically publicly disclose these terms.
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.
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.”
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So in summary, the license for the codec is getting more and more expensive, and so support is simply axed to avoid paying the license.
Re:Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:4, Interesting)
Providing the desired information in comments only serves to reinforce the clickbait behavior so it is rather confusing if you really like clickbait or not. Also I used to have a cat that would purr and bite you at the same time.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.
Re: Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score:1)
would that entail a 4ct increase in price? sounds kind of ridiculous tbh... am I missing something?
Re: (Score:2)
It is per device. But it is an additional cost. Cynically, I can imagine that accountants factored in licensing cost when they sold the laptop. Now an executive has found a way to save the company money by screwing over customers. That executive will get a nice bonus this year.
Re: (Score:2)
Did they think consumers would choose another brand if they raised prices by four pennies? Hell, they could raise the price of a $2000+ laptop by an entire quarter (that's $0.25, not $500) and nobody would care.
So, then why do it? My guess would be that this is how they tell VIA to take their license fee and cram it. Dell and HP are major vendors. If they kill support, that could drive sites to look at other codecs. That, potentially, either kills HVEC or it kills the fee increase.
So, less a move
Re: (Score:2)
It just shows how little companies care about their customers. They watch their profits right down to the single cent like Gollum with the ring. They wouldn't save their own mother's from getting hit by a speeding train if it was going to cost them money to do it. Cold world we live in.
Re: (Score:2)
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.”
I would call this a shit move. Essentially the only reason I'd buy a DiskStation over a cheap-o Mybook NAS or one-off USB disks plugged into the router would be for that Transcoding support. Just bc video codec support is widespread does Not mean all your playback devices support it. The whole point of
Re: (Score:2)
> it’s possible that the OEMs are looking to minimize costs, since OEMs may pay some or all of the licensing fees associated with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support
Then why don't they make that license fee available / payable by the customer? Windows did just that, it's why there's a 99c app in the Microsoft store called "HEVC Video Extensions". Incidentally the original Raspberry Pi did the same thing with the MPEG 2 decoder.
Completely shipping broken (by modern standards) hardware without recourse is just shit.
and will an paided bios update show soon to get it (Score:2)
and will an paided bios update show soon to get it back for an low cost of $49.99?
Media patents are still a problem? (Score:3)
I remember the celebrations in the open source community when the GIF patents expired in 2003.
Re: (Score:2)
Still? My friend the world is actively trying to create new problems as they go. It's why some companies were pushing the MQA standard in Audio, it had licensing terms that would make even MPEG-LA say "Daaaaamn!"
Someone will find a way (Score:2)
If the chip as the hardware capability to decode it, then it's just a matter of finding how to turn it back on. Patched firmware, hardware pin or a hidden system call somewhere. Sooner or later someone will find it. There's no limits to what can be achieved when you piss of bunch of nerds with a lot of time on their hands and a taste for vengeance.
How disabled is disabled? (Score:2)
I don't know much about firmware, so maybe somebody here can help me out. The capability is still in the CPU, but Dell and HP have disabled it. How long will it be until some bright star who understands these things writes a firmware revision to re-enable it?
I'm ancient...I recall when overclocking was an edgy, high risk activity. Not so much now. Can we look forward to a new generation of hackers who will find ways to make computer components work the way they were actually designed to?
Re: (Score:2)
Personally I have never been big on the idea of voiding my warranty just to get the laptop I really wanted.
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They're hardware vendors, so it's likely disabled in either the hardware or the firmware.
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It doesn't exactly make sense.. If it's a hardware CPU feature, then you could embed the instructions in your program.
System firmware's function is to manage BIOS components such as peripheral addons and system boot; firmware does not have control over CPU offloads or what CPU Opcodes or instructions can be found in your program code that the CPU will read from your program's memory during the fetch cycle.
The only way they could cause you troubles is if the CPU vendor has specially added some system regist
Re: (Score:2)
On Linux: No need, it finds the hardware and uses it.
On Windows: Well, Microsoft is probably fine with this crap move and will try to sabotage attempts.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet another reason to throw Windows out the... window. I have a Dell XPS 17" that runs fine under the current Linux Mint. It didn't a few years ago when it was new (sound card wasn't detected by older kernels), but it's quite nice now. It's even got two NVME slots, so I just added a second one for Linux.
The only issues I've had so far is when I reboot from Linux it wants to start Windows (probably a BIOS problem, fixed by having Windows boot manager put up a screen) and recently the 80% battery charge limi
HP stands for Horrible Products (Score:4, Insightful)
Decades ago, this was a great company. They made analogue bench test equipment that's probably still in use. Now, not so much. Back in 2006, they hired PI to try to plant spyware on at least one reporter's computer.
Nowadays, HP - not even once.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. That has happened to a lot of companies that were originally lead by engineers.
A few clarifications (Score:4, Informative)
1.) DELL and HP-ink* DID NOT kill codec support retroactively. Unlike Synology (also mentioned in the article), who removed the codecs RETROACTIVELY FOR ALL MODELS PAST AND PRESENT, probably because they could not be arsed to keep different versions of their DSM 7.3 OS with or without the codecs depending on the HW model, and also, because the oldest models could not for the life of them keep doing the transcoding with all the extra stuff that was dumped on them form DSM 5 all the way to DSM 7.3.
2.) The thing is, if you had a DELL or HP-ink computer model XYZ-rev1 from early 2025 you had the codec, and then all of the sudden, when you buy a second computer model XYZ-rev02 from late 2025 with pretty much the same hardware, sudenly, you do not have said codecs, even if the hardware encoder/decoder is still there.This baffled some customers, and offered untold click-bait-rage potential for tech news outlets everywhere.
3.) DELL and HP-ink want to either save the price of the olive** by not paying the 24cents for the codec royalties going forward, or upsell you to a higher priced fuller featured laptop. Either way, is money in their pocket.
4.) Cue people developing scripts to re-inject support by automaticaly downloading and extracting drivers and miscelaneous files (like .inf files) from older computers from DELL and HP-ink website (or failing that, downloading them from the generic driver packs from Intel and AMD iGPU drivers), complementing them with FFMPEG 8, and making some registry and other tweaks in 3... 2... 1...
5.) Again, this is not retroactive to older models, if the laptop you bought a few quarters back had the codecs active then, it still has the codecs active now. Is models within the same series, with very similar hardware and model numbers the ones that now ship without said codecs that are causing confusion.
* A few years ago HP split into HPe (e for enterprise) for servers, networking and datacenter stuff, and HP Inc for PCs and Laptops and Printers. HP-ink is a pun.
** [1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moiravetter/2015/06/04/the-40000-olive-how-entrepreneurs-can-spend-time-saving-money/
Re: (Score:2)
From what I understand, Linux doesn't care. It probes the hw, finds the capability, and uses it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. On Linux, as soon as you get the kernel loaded and started, it takes over and uses what is there, unless you tell it not to.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes and no. Linux itself does not have HEVC drivers built in; however, it will load third party drivers like in FFmpeg or gstreamer.
Artificial scarcity? (Score:2)
I.e. they want people to pay more for it, so they disable what is there and works fine on cheaper models?
I think in the EU, that would be pretty illegal. In the US, it is probably entirely fine.
Bringing the Pain? (Score:2)
It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?
If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is [1]mostly complete [wikipedia.org] with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when St
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware_encoding_and_decoding_support
Re: (Score:2)
> It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?
If Nokia has a valid patent and HP paid up for years then why would they not continue to pay? Despite what you heard, HP is only disabling it on some laptops. This sounds more like a cost cutting move.
> If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete [wikipedia.org] with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.
Apple added AV1 hardware decoding starting with M3 and A18 chips. AV1 hardware decoders have been on Intel GPUs since 11th generation. For AMD since Radeon 6000 series GPUs. NVidia has had it since RTX 3000 series. Encoding is another matter.
Good products (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight.. they are recommending software decoding as an alternative to hardware decoding that they took away? Also dont popular streaming services like Netflix use HECV? I always stayed away from Dell and HP anyway because I didn't think of them as good products. Now I know they aren't.
Re:Good products (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering they aren't going out of their way to disable the encoder itself.
> Nokia sued HP and Amazon in October 2023 in multiple countries such as USA, UK and more for violating H.264/H.265 patents
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-hp-inc/
Patents on HEVC won't be clear until like 2030. Modes for VR won't expire until like 2050
Re:Good products (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really understand the point you are trying to make so forgive me if I am out to lunch, but this matters naught to the consumer. This is just back-office dealings that either adds $5 to the cost of a laptop or doesn't. It's there vendors choice what licenses they pay or don't pay. Then they get to set the price on their laptop after it all shapes out.
Re: Good products (Score:2)
Some people fly RyanAir others prefer to buy a premium seat on a legacy carrier. Both products get you from A to B, just at different price points.
HP and Dell (and other manufacturers) want to make products at different price points. $5 here and $5 there adds up to real money. It is neither right or wrong, assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront. One does not buy RyanAir expecting a lay flat international first class.
This is not a new phenomenon. IBM mainframes have had the feature where
Re: (Score:2)
The difference between two airlines are glaringly different. How many consumers can even understand the difference? The last system I bought was a mini PC for $200 Canadian and it has hardware HECV encoding. My $400 Costco phone has hardware encoding. If a company like HP can't handle it than they must have something funny going on with the economics of their company internally keeping them from having enough flexibility to absorb this. And I have definitely had my eyes opened to looking closely at har
Re: (Score:3)
> It is neither right or wrong
It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.
> assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront.
If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.
Re: (Score:3)
Even if it is in the largest font size, is the average person even going to understand what the ramifications are? Does the average consumer even know what HECV is?
Re: (Score:2)
> Even if it is in the largest font size, is the average person even going to understand what the ramifications are?
No, but it would let people who care know, and it would let people who potentially care google and find out.
Re: (Score:3)
That's sort of not relevant is it? Neither HP nor Dell actually made these encoders in these devices. They are made by Intel and part of the iGPU. If anyone has license concerns it's Intel.
Now there may be a reason why they won't ship a licence for specific software but HP don't provide the browser or media decoders either, so in theory the hardware decoder should be available to anyone either through open source software or via Microsoft (sidenote: Do you still need to buy the HEVC Video Extensions from th
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It's worse, they recommend software for encoding as well.
It's because they have to pay licence fees for HEVC. Most streaming services use AV1 now, which is free and supported.
Re: (Score:2)
This just seems like sour grapes to me. How much would they have to add to the price of a laptop to make it full featured?
Re:Good products (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently it's around $4 per device. The margins are thin on their low end models, and they are greedy, so I guess $4 is too much for a feature that few people care about or will notice not being available. Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.
The real blame here is on the patent holders. AV1 is the solution for everyone else.
Re: (Score:2)
> and they are greedy
Bingo. I guess the companies I do buy from may be greedy too, but so far they have at least been able to hide how it affects the consumer.
Re: (Score:1)
I think the license is $1 per device (per year?); however, I do not put it past HP and Dell to have added it to the cost when they sold the laptop. They just want to cheap out now.
Re:Good products (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's a licensing fee for HEVC then it's understandable that they disable it.
The reason is that the competition on bulk corporate computers is very tough - corporations always tries to get the cheapest possible computer that will run the office package decently. They don't care about collateral damage like not all videos are viewable because you shouldn't watch videos at work.
Re: (Score:2)
Boo frickin hoo. Doesn't mean they should be making a blatant attempt to try to save a buck on people who don't know better. I'm getting tired of a world where every company thinks of any way to screw people over without it blowing back on them.