Comment by shmerl

21 hours ago

When even H.265 is being dropped by the likes of Dell, adoption of H.266 will be even worse making it basically DOA for anything promising. It's plagued by the same problems H.265 is.

Dell is significant in the streaming and media world?

  • Dell and HP are significant in the "devices" world and they just dropped the support for HEVC hardware encoding/decoding [1] to save a few cents per device. You can still pay for the Microsoft add-in that does this. It's not just streaming, your Teams background blur was handled like that.

    Eventually people and companies will associate HEVC with "that thing that costs extra to work", and software developers will start targeting AV1/2 so their software performance isn't depending on whether the laptop manufacturer or user paid for the HEVC license.

    [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-...

    • On the same line, Synology dropped it on their NAS too (for their video, media etc ... Even thumbnails, they ask the sender device to generate one locally and send it, the NAS won't do it anymore for HEVC)

    • Dell is dropping it to save 4 cents per device, so users will have to pay $1 to Microsoft per user instead. Go figure.

    • Also you can just use Linux, Dell / HP have no control over the actual GPU for that, I think they just disabled it in Windows level. Linux has no gatekeepers for that and you can use your GPU as you want.

      But this just indicates that HEVC etc. is a dead end anyway.