Dell and HP disable hardware H.265 decoding on select PCs due to rising royalty costs — companies could save big on HEVC royalties, but at the expense of users

Dell and HP have begun to ship some of their PCs with disabled HEVC/H.265 hardware decoding, potentially in a bid to avoid paying royalties to patent holders, reports Ars Technica. The majority of PCs that come with disabled HEVC/H.265 hardware decoding capability are business-oriented entry-level or mainstream machines, whereas premium offerings with high-quality displays come with all the features activated.

Dell and HP confirmed to Ars Technica that a number of their laptops, including Dell's 'standard and base systems' as well as HP's EliteBook and ProBook 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 laptops, come with disabled support for hardware decoding of video streams encoded using the HEVC/H.265 codec. Dell emphasized that systems featuring an integrated 4K display, a standalone GPU, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink Blu-ray software come equipped with HEVC/H.265 hardware decoding capability. Interestingly, Dell advises users to purchase 'an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store' to re-enable HEVC decoding.

While neither Dell nor HP explained the motives behind removing hardware decoding capability that has been around for a long time, Ars Technica believes that the companies are trying to cut down costs as HEVC/H.265 codec patent holders plan to increase their licensing fees in the short term. Indeed, to support hardware decoding of HEVC/H.265 videos on a device, device makers must pay royalties to MPEG LA ($0.2 per device, or $25 million per annum per entity), HEVC Advance (up to $1 per device, or annual license cap of $40 million), Velos Media (rumored between $1 and $2 per device), Via LA ($0.25 per unit or $25 million per entity per annum). Given that both Dell and HP sell tens of millions of PCs every year, the drop in such licensing payments translates into huge savings amounting to tens of millions of dollars per year. However, such savings also translate to greatly reduced experience for end users.

Virtually all discrete and integrated GPUs support hardware decoding of video streams encoded using the HEVC/H.265 codec, as the first GPUs featuring this capability emerged in 2015 – 2017 (starting with Kaby Lake in Intel's case). GPU developers must pay to implement HEVC hardware decode at the silicon level, so patent pools get their money directly from companies like Apple, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, or Qualcomm. However, to enable hardware decoding on the device level, OEMs must pay patent pools as well. If they do not pay royalty fees, they must disable the capability on the software (by modifying drivers) or firmware level, or by asking their GPU vendor to fuse the capability off in silicon (which is not something that is usually done).

If a capability is turned off using a modified driver, then an end-user can easily re-enable it by installing generic drivers from AMD, Intel, or Nvidia, but at the cost of losing some customizations. However, things disabled on the firmware level are hard to restore. Also, despite Dell's advice, no third-party player can re-enable hardware HEVC decoding if it is disabled in drivers or firmware. It can only add power-hungry software decoding, but this is probably something that many pre-installed programs can do by default.

As a result, it looks like users of inexpensive systems now have to prefer content encoded using AV1 or other open-source hardware codecs, or hope that their CPUs are powerful enough to decode high-resolution HEVC streams.

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