> For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
If I understood the article correctly, you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store. All stakeholders win. Licensor. OEM. Microsoft. We made the pie bigger!
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?
It doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
Hmm.. I guess if this explains why my new work Dell Latitude becomes extremely laggy and unstable when doing Teams meetings with multiple video streams. My 5+ year older Dell Latitude did not have this problem.
The fear may also be that if they pay this there will be further increases in the price. its going up 20% in a few months. What if they think it will double next time, and then in another year etc?
Isn't there a certification for ms teams for pcs? I've seen a lot of headsets and speakers with a "certified for ms teams" badge on it. I guess Microsoft needs to extend it to laptops too, make hevc support mandatory and tell their customers.
Nope, boss2 fixes those complaints and gets the relevant complaint rate down by 300%. Everybody conveniently forgets why it was so high in the first place.
And does the background blurring part of their pipeline somehow consume the raw H.265 bitstream directly..? Wouldn't they be blurring based on the raw pixel buffer, before any encoding takes place?
The problem is double dipping. If Intel and AMD represent 100% of all x86 Laptop. In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together. And all x86 devices would have HEVC licenses. HP and Dell shouldn't have to pay for it.
In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
Luckily H.264 High Profile is already patent free in many countries and soon to be patent free in US too. Let's hope AV2 really get its act together this time around. Then the world would just be H.264 as baseline and AV2 for high quality.
The article is a bit light on technical details. Can someone shed a light on how hardware decoding is disabled? Do they blow an efuse, disable it in the firmware or in the OS?
It's not disabled in the sense many people are thinking. The codecs just aren't installed by default. The hardware is present and still functional. You just have to use software that directly supports HEVC or buy your own HEVC license on the Microsoft store for $1 to get system-wide hardware accelerated HEVC codecs.
From what I'd heard, it's the actual HP and Dell OEM'ed drivers they provide for the hardware. If you load the official Intel drivers, HEVC works fine.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
Isn't it something that was already sold to me as a customer? I don't get it how company could remove one of the features that has been already sold to me.
It only affects new devices, they don't pull the existing licenses.
Not every device includes a HEVC license. For cheap consumer devices or custom built PCs no license is the norm. It just used to be the norm for the premium brands to include the license with every device.
Edit: I was wrong, I misread “purchase” as “purchased” which aligned with my (flawed) memory of what happened and it made sense with the full sentence. Original comment remains below.
> no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch
...
> customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app
Is it possible to just buy the HEVC extension on the Microsoft store to enable it?
I have a PC that came without the license, and I had to buy it to get everything working. It was more an annoyance than a problem, it's only a 99 cent purchase.
It is likely linked to increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026. The increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026 are due to a 25% rate adjustment announced by Access Advance LLC, which manages the HEVC Advance patent pool. https://accessadvance.com/2025/07/21/access-advance-announce...
So the fault is at purchasing departments, that buy incompatible laptops. They would probably need to order hevc as an option, or roll out licenses via MDM.
Individual buyers can just buy the HEVC license from the Windows store. I think windows even opens the store, if the codec is missing. A lot of companies disable the public App Store on their MDM though.
If missing licenses impact end users on a larger scale, it's also a communication issue from the manufacturers. This won't do them any good, as customers will be annoyed from the bad user experience. Even if one in 100 customers switches the brand, they make a loss.
How much relevant is HEVC on computers? I encounter H.264, VP9 and AV1 and that is pretty much all. I know HEVC is used on Blu-ray and in DVB-T, but that is usually played by dedicated hardware, not PC.
Video calls and some live streamings. Steam Remote Play (together), Sunshine/Moonlight and Parsec for gaming where you can easily check the client's capabilities and go with whatever is best. Discord also does similar for video calls I believe. Steams newer game recording feature also only supports h264/h265 with no AV1 support.
Many things that used to be h.264 are now using h.265 (hevc). Without this license a lot of applications can't play hevc at all, they rely on the codecs included in windows (which are unavailable without a license). They either fall back to another codec, or stop working. The article mentioned issues with videos playback in browsers and issues with ms teams.
Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.
HEVC is pretty much a straight improvement over h264. Same quality, much smaller file sizes, and it's actually got HW decode supported in most integrated GPUs unlike av1. I've been converting all my h264 stuff, saves a lot of space on my disks.
I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible
I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but ruin your user experience?
It's like Samsung uses faulty "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor on some of the cheaper phones (including S series FE phones) which results in butt dialing: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/o56uz4/s20_fe_pock... -- seriously, is this the place they need to be frugal?
Or, although this is a matter of more than a few dollars -- all ThinkPad T series screens are terrible with low brightness and 45% NTSC color range, unless your IT department is nice enough to purchase a version with upgraded screen, which is almost guaranteed to never happen.
I used to like to hate on Apple, but these days, I appreciate how they don't cheap out on things so that user never needs to double check a specific thing in the spec sheet and deal with the mess.
>I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but
>ruin your user experience?
How? Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
If they were approached by mpreg, I cannot blame them for choosing to disable the codecs over paying the racket.
I just wish they made a public statement about it at the time, and were loud about it in their product pages, rather than customers having to find out in this manner.
Name and shame, and recommend customers to use AOM codecs, rather than silently handle it.
VP8 was never competitive with H.264 – like WebP the apparent savings was due to lowering detail by double-encoding. Since people care about battery life / fan noise it only made sense if you were running a huge operation with the infrastructure to encode variants for niche combinations as well as the mainstream devices.
VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.
> Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
Like everything? Its objectively better in every way.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, RDP, Teams, etc...
You'll note that Zoom and Webex aren't listed which is why Teams provides sharper screen sharing with less bandwidth. Its likely they also didn't want to pay the shiny nickel to have happier users.
EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
Your phone likely records videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years). If you want to watch your own videos on a PC, you are dealing with the codec.
Not even that, you just need to know the "hidden" link to the codecs, then it's free. I'm sure Microsoft is well aware of these links, there are many articles about them.
Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
> For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
Note that it's not a $0.24 increase Dell and HP are upset over, its an increase of $0.04. The price they were paying was $0.20.
So if you have a Dell or HP laptop, your hardware acceleration is broken because your experience with the hardware isn't worth $0.04 to the OEM.
If I understood the article correctly, you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store. All stakeholders win. Licensor. OEM. Microsoft. We made the pie bigger!
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
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I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?
It doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
1 reply →
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
It probably switches video processing to some legacy stack, that doesn't have all the features.
Hmm.. I guess if this explains why my new work Dell Latitude becomes extremely laggy and unstable when doing Teams meetings with multiple video streams. My 5+ year older Dell Latitude did not have this problem.
The fear may also be that if they pay this there will be further increases in the price. its going up 20% in a few months. What if they think it will double next time, and then in another year etc?
Isn't there a certification for ms teams for pcs? I've seen a lot of headsets and speakers with a "certified for ms teams" badge on it. I guess Microsoft needs to extend it to laptops too, make hevc support mandatory and tell their customers.
That will be someone elses area
Boss 1 saved 0.02% of the cost of the laptop, but thanks to scale works out to be $2.4m. He walks away with his $240k bonus.
Boss 2 sees increased complaints about Teams and blames Microsoft.
Nope, boss2 fixes those complaints and gets the relevant complaint rate down by 300%. Everybody conveniently forgets why it was so high in the first place.
Does MS Teams actually use HEVC rather than VP9 or AV1?
If so, time for customers to complain to Microsoft.
And does the background blurring part of their pipeline somehow consume the raw H.265 bitstream directly..? Wouldn't they be blurring based on the raw pixel buffer, before any encoding takes place?
The problem is double dipping. If Intel and AMD represent 100% of all x86 Laptop. In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together. And all x86 devices would have HEVC licenses. HP and Dell shouldn't have to pay for it.
In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
Luckily H.264 High Profile is already patent free in many countries and soon to be patent free in US too. Let's hope AV2 really get its act together this time around. Then the world would just be H.264 as baseline and AV2 for high quality.
> In theory Intel and AMD would pay the HEVC fees once, which is capped IRRC at $100M from all patent pool together.
My understanding is that the licensing lawyers learned from Cisco doing that with H.264 for Firefox and there isn’t a cap with H.265.
There is definitely a cap with HEVC Advance and VIA. Not sure if they have closed anything about the H.264 loophole.
> The problem is double dipping.
No, the problem is trying to use royalty-bearing formats for internet video. Royalty-free formats like AV1 avoid the problem.
This is the correct answer. AV1 is amazing and with a bit more funding and hardware support it could get us out of this entire mess.
Until AV3 finally rolls around, of course. Then the world would be just H.264 as baseline and AV3 for high quality.
The article is a bit light on technical details. Can someone shed a light on how hardware decoding is disabled? Do they blow an efuse, disable it in the firmware or in the OS?
It's not disabled in the sense many people are thinking. The codecs just aren't installed by default. The hardware is present and still functional. You just have to use software that directly supports HEVC or buy your own HEVC license on the Microsoft store for $1 to get system-wide hardware accelerated HEVC codecs.
The hardware acceleration is disabled in driver. Even using VLC you won't have acceleration for HEVC.
3 replies →
From what I'd heard, it's the actual HP and Dell OEM'ed drivers they provide for the hardware. If you load the official Intel drivers, HEVC works fine.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
Just like the embedded GPU in a CPU needs a driver to work, the embedded video decoder/encoder also needs a driver.
Isn't it something that was already sold to me as a customer? I don't get it how company could remove one of the features that has been already sold to me.
It only affects new devices, they don't pull the existing licenses.
Not every device includes a HEVC license. For cheap consumer devices or custom built PCs no license is the norm. It just used to be the norm for the premium brands to include the license with every device.
Edit: I was wrong, I misread “purchase” as “purchased” which aligned with my (flawed) memory of what happened and it made sense with the full sentence. Original comment remains below.
It’s not without precedent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...
The example you provided is exactly the opposite:
> no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch ... > customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app
5 replies →
Is it possible to just buy the HEVC extension on the Microsoft store to enable it?
I have a PC that came without the license, and I had to buy it to get everything working. It was more an annoyance than a problem, it's only a 99 cent purchase.
It is likely linked to increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026. The increased HEVC licensing costs starting January 2026 are due to a 25% rate adjustment announced by Access Advance LLC, which manages the HEVC Advance patent pool. https://accessadvance.com/2025/07/21/access-advance-announce...
Yes it should work with the codec pack, and they're keeping it on some of their laptops like with dedicated gpus
So the fault is at purchasing departments, that buy incompatible laptops. They would probably need to order hevc as an option, or roll out licenses via MDM.
Individual buyers can just buy the HEVC license from the Windows store. I think windows even opens the store, if the codec is missing. A lot of companies disable the public App Store on their MDM though.
If missing licenses impact end users on a larger scale, it's also a communication issue from the manufacturers. This won't do them any good, as customers will be annoyed from the bad user experience. Even if one in 100 customers switches the brand, they make a loss.
Royalty-free video formats are the way to go. It avoids the problem in the first place.
The internet is built on royalty-free formats and protocols. Video is not special or different.
Force them all into 480p video and link them back to the information that the mfg crippled them to save a few cents.
While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
However, I'd personally accept to be able to buy my own license and enable the hardware a-la Raspberry Pi fashion.
Moreover, this is done on more expensive, business notebooks as well, which are both more expensive and used by the people who knows about this stuff.
The executives who made these decisions are not the most informed or the most brilliant, I assume.
[0]: https://via-la.com/licensing-programs/hevc-vvc/#license-fees
How much relevant is HEVC on computers? I encounter H.264, VP9 and AV1 and that is pretty much all. I know HEVC is used on Blu-ray and in DVB-T, but that is usually played by dedicated hardware, not PC.
Video calls and some live streamings. Steam Remote Play (together), Sunshine/Moonlight and Parsec for gaming where you can easily check the client's capabilities and go with whatever is best. Discord also does similar for video calls I believe. Steams newer game recording feature also only supports h264/h265 with no AV1 support.
Many things that used to be h.264 are now using h.265 (hevc). Without this license a lot of applications can't play hevc at all, they rely on the codecs included in windows (which are unavailable without a license). They either fall back to another codec, or stop working. The article mentioned issues with videos playback in browsers and issues with ms teams.
Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.
HEVC is pretty much a straight improvement over h264. Same quality, much smaller file sizes, and it's actually got HW decode supported in most integrated GPUs unlike av1. I've been converting all my h264 stuff, saves a lot of space on my disks.
I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible
If you’re watching streaming content in 4K, most of that is streamed in HEVC. Also, any phones that record video typically do so in HEVC by default.
For recording video on phones, there is h.264, and the relatively newer, better option HEVC.
Thus much of peoples' photo library is becoming HEVC.
AFAIK, using linux instead if windows fixes the problem.
I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but ruin your user experience?
It's like Samsung uses faulty "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor on some of the cheaper phones (including S series FE phones) which results in butt dialing: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/o56uz4/s20_fe_pock... -- seriously, is this the place they need to be frugal?
Or, although this is a matter of more than a few dollars -- all ThinkPad T series screens are terrible with low brightness and 45% NTSC color range, unless your IT department is nice enough to purchase a version with upgraded screen, which is almost guaranteed to never happen.
I used to like to hate on Apple, but these days, I appreciate how they don't cheap out on things so that user never needs to double check a specific thing in the spec sheet and deal with the mess.
>I wonder how these decisions are made? Skimp on these things to save a few cents but
>ruin your user experience?
How? Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
If they were approached by mpreg, I cannot blame them for choosing to disable the codecs over paying the racket.
I just wish they made a public statement about it at the time, and were loud about it in their product pages, rather than customers having to find out in this manner.
Name and shame, and recommend customers to use AOM codecs, rather than silently handle it.
VP8 was never competitive with H.264 – like WebP the apparent savings was due to lowering detail by double-encoding. Since people care about battery life / fan noise it only made sense if you were running a huge operation with the infrastructure to encode variants for niche combinations as well as the mainstream devices.
VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.
> Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
Like everything? Its objectively better in every way.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, RDP, Teams, etc...
You'll note that Zoom and Webex aren't listed which is why Teams provides sharper screen sharing with less bandwidth. Its likely they also didn't want to pay the shiny nickel to have happier users.
EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
1 reply →
Your phone likely records videos in HEVC format (if purchased in the last few years). If you want to watch your own videos on a PC, you are dealing with the codec.
That's something to begin with.
Would be more acceptable if it was possible to pay $0.24 to enable it.
You can, you need to buy a codec from the Microsoft store for $1 or local equivalent. Most people won't know this.
Does the codec enable the hardware support?
Not even that, you just need to know the "hidden" link to the codecs, then it's free. I'm sure Microsoft is well aware of these links, there are many articles about them.
Having the feature > being able to buy it > being completely locked out of > have to subscribe to a recurring payment.
For the first device mentioned it has a discrete Nvidia GPU which also supports HEVC encode/decode in hardware, which I assume is also disabled?
It's like those cars where you pay a subscription to use the heated seats.
Relevant username
I'm assuming it's being disabled in firmware. Is there a way to re-enable it? Can the firmware be downgraded?
Maybe I'm reading between lines, but isn't it ridiculous to talk about license prices when the affected machines are $900 pro laptops?
I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.
Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
>$5 worse experience
lets all calm down, its about h.265 nobody sane uses anyway
1 reply →
Really?
Ah well. No HP and Dell laptops then. So long!