Yes this is absolutely ridiculous.
This is also a good reason to avoid proprietary codecs. H.265 may be a great codec, but the licensing fees are basically a tax on the world.
The best solution would be an overall switch to AV1. But silicon support for that is not nearly as widespread.
Yeah that’s going to change fucking fast. My game streaming service I build from older parts to cut costs has 1 shiney modern part because of AV1. Just AV1. Nothing else influenced the purchase of that part.
And there is no way a big company made that part just for me.
Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.
The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.
They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it’s become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.
HEIC is hated because nobody knows what to do with it. Apple devices use it. That’s it.
Nobody knows what to do with it because it’s proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn’t use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn’t use it for anything ever.
If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn’t be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.
Actually come to think of it I’m kind of surprised Google doesn’t do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default…
Google does all the same evil shit apple does and nerfs it just enough to spin a good image. They are not your friend.
Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the ‘Don’t be evil’ era, but that era is long past.
They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.
Let me get this straight - people buy a product advertised as having a feature, containing a part also advertised as having that feature, and then they disable it after purchase?
How is that legal?
Americans have no consumer protections.
Why would they when capitalists are more important than the consumers.
Line must go up, even if it’s a lie.
NVIDIA said line must go circle, which their CEO says means up.
a circle…like the ryzen logo. AMD! This goes deeper than we thought!
No, they disable it before purchase, existing laptops still have the feature. Only the newer ones so they won’t have to pay the royalties from next year. But still an anti consumer move as nobody will notice until it’s too late for a refund. Normal people will never understand why their $200 phone can smoothly play h265 videos while their $1500 laptop is struggling with that. Everyone will assume that because hardware support is included in the cheapest processors from even a decade ago, it will still be present in the latest and greatest laptops from hp
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So the hardware is capable, but refuses to work until someone pays for the licensing cost. Yay capitalism bringing innovation!
It’s interesting how the tone of innovation changes. It starts out like “hey, I can do that better than my competitors!” and that’s all fine, doing something better creating market demand and cash influx. But eventually, the innovation looks for shortcuts… enshitification is the word. Cheaper parts, smaller quantities, subscriptions to hardware you buy but never own… There’s a shift from product/service innovation as means to financial growth to purely financially incentivized innovation.
It reminds me of Marx’s idea that concentration of capital naturally leads to the prominence of financial markets, an indicator of a capitalist economy reaching its “advanced” / crisis-prone phase. The similarity being: there’s an economic shift from industrial investment as means to financial growth to purely financial investment.
does dell/hp have to pay annual license fees in perpetuity for systems they sell???
H.265 (HEVC) is not a free (as in freedom) codec, so yes. You as an individual consumer can use things like Handbrake to encode H.265 video for your personal use, probably using the free x265 software encoder, but in order for a device like your phone, camera, TV, laptop, etc. to have hardware accelerated encoding or decoding, the manufacturer has to pay a licensing fee.
This is true of lots of proprietary technologies. HDMI is another one. In order for a device to ship with an HDMI port (as opposed to Displayport), the manufacturer has to pay a per-device licensing fee.
To be fair, I think it is okay to ask for a one-time fee for something you’ve developed. You want to use this $tech that I made? Sure, pay me 10 ct for every device you put it in.
That’s reasonable, people deserve to get paid for their labor. In this situation however, the difference between them is that DisplayPort is a royalty free VESA standard. So while manufacturers have to pay for the materials and such to include it in their devices, they don’t have to pay any additional fees to license the standard. HDMI on the other-hand is a “brand” of proprietary connector/interface (kind of like how “Velcro” isn’t the actual name of a product, it’s a “brand” of hook and pile tape), so not only do manufacturers have to pay for the materials and labor related to physically acquiring and installing the connectors, but they have to pay both per-device and annual licensing fees for rights to use the HDMI product.
has to pay a per-device licensing fee.
Where I’m confused, is that it would be a perpertual/long term annual license fee per device. It would make sense to have a one time fee per device shipped. That would not affect older models.
I guess what is happening is that manufacturers can stop paying for the capabilities by “downgrading” their driver support, and it affects old and new systems the same when users “update”?
The headline is a little misleading.
As I understand it, they haven’t retroactively removed the HEVC capability from any devices that already shipped with it enabled.
Rather, they have stopped including it in new ones of the same model or in certain new models, even though those machines still have CPUs which have the capability built in for it.
This has resulted in e.g. businesses buying a laptop which works fine for conference calls and other stuff, then buying another laptop the “exact same” and suddenly it’s nerfed.
H.265 is not a royalty free standard like AV1, VP9, Theora, etc. It’s covered by proprietary patents held by groups like MPEG LA so in order for manufacturers to build hardware level support for it into their devices they have to pay whatever the then current royalty fees are to those patent holders.
Do they also need to pay for VGA or DVI?
I’m not sure about those… But I do know what they don’t have to pay extra for is DisplayPort which is far superior to Hdmi.
VGA was originally a proprietary technology developed by IBM, though it was later built upon by VESA and is now publicly documented, so while it wasn’t developed by VESA as an open standard from the get-go, it is now considered an open standard that doesn’t require any licensing fees to implement. DVI was developed by the “Digital Display Working Group” and also does not require any licensing fees, though there are licensing terms you may have to abide by and there may be some costs associated with testing and validation to ensure you meet those terms and the spec.
Dumb of HP and Dell to not eat the cost. Just in the future never support VVC. HEVC is well enough a thing already. Push defaults to be AV1 and then in like 5-7 years, AV2. I use AV1 for everything I can. Computer supports it. My phone does not but edits I do on my PC will be encoded to AV1. Photos, support JPEG-XL but in the interim, AVIF. Screw apple for going with HEIC. I highly doubt that there will be a successor to UHD Blu-Rays to adopt VVC. No big reason to jump to 8k. Only good would be higher bitrates/better compression and audio.
Films are mostly recorded digitally with 4k-6k cameras or a limited amount of 35mm still going on that scans well to around 4k. 8K digital cinema cameras are becoming more common but the 4k-6k ones are dominant and 70mm is expensive and uncommon. Plus significant digital effects are prevalent on even low action movies, non-sci-fi. Those are still going to have been mostly done and mastered for 4k. Another round of remastering required for 8k content where digital or 70mm film masters exists. Dinosaur broadcasters may choose VVC the shrinking world population watching dinosaur broadcasters. AV1 is increasingly the present and AV2 will be the future. VVC will be end of line because of short sighted greed
Kinda makes me even more glad I’ve been migrating all my stuff over to AV1/OPUS.
So in this case, even if your hardware was impacted by this, if you tried to play a H.265 (HEVC) file within Windows, it would play, but will software encode / decode. What if you are playing something through a client like VLC or Jellyfin Media Player? Prior to this change, would Jellyfin report Direct Playing (using iGPU) and now it will be forced to transcode on the server side, and VLC would still use the CPU for encoding and decoding, since there is no server to do it for you?
“Direct playing” just means the source file is entirely compatible with the client device and doesn’t require any transcoding/re-encoding by the server, it doesn’t really tell you whether the client is using software or hardware decoding to play it. I’m guessing it’s probable that a Jellyfin server could still report “direct playing” even if the client is using software decoding to play it. However, if the client device is something like a smart TV or something with a more locked down OS, and the maintainer/manufacturer removes support for a codec from that device, you may show more transcoding action on your server for things that previously just direct played because smart devices like that may not have support for software decoding, or may not have the horsepower to try even if they still have the codecs installed.
Make sure to use “disable phase inversion” for Opus if you want good quality in mono. I’m suprised this isn’t set by default.
I just set it to downmix to mono in Handbrake and it’s been alright. I’ll definitely do some reading/comparing to see what this setting is all about though.
i use x265 for EVERYTHING. i had no clue about this.
fuck.
webm? lol
webm is a container, not a codec
Even if you hit that blocker, you can still software-decode with [alternative] software.
i clearly need to educate myself
Did you do it yet
yep, learned quite a bit about how to pirate more effectively, and how to use av1.
AV1
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No need for AI summary, I found this in two seconds as a web search.
https://getstream.io/glossary/video-codecs/
At any rate, it looks like the AI was pretty accurate this time. Cheers!
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?
In this context they think they have found ‘another’ troll. They are a troll. Trying to troll me in another thread. Takes anyone who has a negative opinion of something they post and calls them a troll. Forgot to log into the correct account when they posted a wall of links at me for calling their alts accounts link to a cpu hog news site trash.
Oh.
That’s pathetic.
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I love how to never answered what GPU you had 🤣
How is this done? Can you just re-enable the feature in the BIOS? And what about machines sold outside the US?
It’s clearly a move to make torrent for movies unviable and get funding from Netflix.
Not until you pull the handbrake at least
Is that a hardware or software issue? I.e. is it caused by the windows driver for these laptops’ graphic units?
Does HEVC work with the Linux drivers on these machines?
No, it’s a licensing issue. H.265 hardware support requires an ongoing license. And HP+Dell don’t want to continue paying licensing fees for PCs they have already sold. So they’re telling customers “get fucked, use a media player with software decoding instead of using hardware acceleration directly in your browser.”
What is your source for it needing constant renewal?
This is for new hardware sales only, not existing.?
This doesn’t answer the Linux part of the question.
What does “licensing issue” means for the laptop itself? Is HEVC disabled at BIOS/firmware level, or it is just disabled at Windows driver level?
In the latter case, HEVC should work with Linux, as it uses generic Intel/AMD drivers, instead of specific Dell/HP ones.
It’s enabled at the hardware level only if the hevc license is paid, usually by the OEM (such as dell or hp).
Can’t current CPUs decode it in real time?
Yeah, because of the ASICs built into them to enable that decoding.
Without that, a 4K HEVC video is in upwards of 100+ billion operations/s to decode on the CPU. Which limits you to high end CPUs getting capped out on something you essentially get for “free” otherwise
I meant without dedicated circuits, obviously. Can’t it be parallelised? Many cpus have a lot of relatively idle cores at a given time…
I remember that my 486 had trouble with mp3 files, but soon enough, I got a new machine with many more spare cycles.
That is parallelized… I didn’t make mention of threading being the concern here.
The 100+ billion operations per second isn’t exactly easy.
4k 60fps = 498 million pixels per second
Each pixel takes a couple hundred logical operations with HEVC.
A modern high end 4GHz, 8 physical core CPU at 4 instructions per cycle, at maximum capacity, can handle 128 billion operations per second.
You probably wouldn’t even get your realtime framerate in this scenario.
Well, what the world really needs are laptops with built-in HVAC support!
So, yeah, HP and Dell are fucked - by what you may ask? Why, AI of course, because it’s hiked memory prices so far up it’s eating up their profit margins. They might be doomed.
You know what? Good.
Because we don’t like Dell and HP or because we don’t like HEVC?
Them selling it then taking it away means they are vulnerable to class action. It’s a bait and switch. The fact that this licensing put them in that position means they may be less likely to trust, use, and therefore empower this behavior in the future.
Cool, makes sense. 👍
They’re a business and they need to make money!
