Comment by nicolaslem
4 hours ago
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?
4 hours ago
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.
That seems like the opposite of what the quoted Reddit post says:
>those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled
From this it sounds like it's been disabled at a lower level, but Windows still expects it to be there and so fails to decode streams unless hwaccel is disabled
Even on Linux?
1 reply →
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.