Comment by sevensor
3 months ago
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.
No one is forcing businesses to buy brands that are unmanagable.
In almost every other way, Dell is probably the most manageable hardware OEM. Fantastic support for automatable, scripted driver and firmware updates, a very consistent and unified platform, easily hot-swappable parts, and a great on-site repair coverage.
I think what's happening here is not that HP and Dell don't want to pay the four cents a device, but as it reflects a 20% price increase in the license, they are "drawing a line" for the license company that increasing cost will cost them money, not make them money. I suspect if it works this problem will resolve itself next year, it just sucks for customers.
>you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store.
That is just a software decoder running on the CPU. HP and Dell are effectively killing any way to hardware-decode (and encode?) HEVC on these models. Which is a thing you want on a power- and heat-limited device such as a laptop.
I understood the article to say that it was a driver that enabled the hardware and not a software decoder.
I don’t think that’s true. I think if you buy that you are getting software decoding which is going to be worse and consume more power.