Comment by wongarsu
4 hours ago
> 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.
Let's just say unless you are buying Windows Enterprise the deployment method of this is basically unmanageable for businesses. Like... individuals need their own Microsoft accounts to buy it for their own PC sort of unmanageable.
There's a way to volume license HEVC but only for very specific enterprise categories, others just can't.
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.
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?