However, I'd personally accept to be able to buy my own license and enable the hardware a-la Raspberry Pi fashion.
Moreover, this is done on more expensive, business notebooks as well, which are both more expensive and used by the people who knows about this stuff.
The executives who made these decisions are not the most informed or the most brilliant, I assume.
[0]: https://via-la.com/licensing-programs/hevc-vvc/#license-fees
Not for HP or Dell. Maybe I've been working in BigTech for too long, but I can't even count that low anymore. $25M is a rounding error for most major product lines I've worked on in the past decade. But, then again, every hardware producing team I've worked on had this exact penny-pinching attitude on BOM cost. They'd throw away $25M opex like it's nothing, but spend $0.25 extra on the BOM?? Never!!!
The company very much doesn't want the customer to know that it spent $20 of the customer's money in wasted productivity to save itself 25 cents
I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
lets all calm down, its about h.265 nobody sane uses anyway
Is this some Linux bigot thing?
Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#:~:t...
Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.
Users can choose h265 for live streams and they allow hevc uploads, but they then transcode it to worse codecs before broadcast.
I wonder how they would save on bandwidth by switching to hevc? I think its something like 40% more efficient on average.
I guess av1 is even better, but what percentage of hardware supports it?
Pretty much everything modern except Apple. Intel since 11th gen (2021), AMD since Zen4 (2022), Samsung phones since 2021, Google phones since 2021, Mediatek since 2020.
With modern lifecycles the way they are, that's probably ~60-80% of everything out there.
Also software decoding works just fine.
Haha, yeah. Haha. Nobody sane.
Sweats
It is however a call out of the GP as well for not knowing how ubiquitous something can be while not being shoved in your face that it is being used. The GP is evidently unaware that most streaming services will offer an h.265 encode for those users that can use it as the bandwidth savings make it very worthwhile. Mobile devices are using HEVC by default now as well as at least iOS using a still image variant. From reading elsewhere in these comments, clearly MS Teams uses it as well.
So just because you don't know it is being used does not mean it is not being used the way you might think.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
IMHO the fact that this wasn't visible on any product page was pretty awful, especially when this was a near globally included feature before. Maybe in an ideal world the customer would be able to pick which licenses they want individually when purchasing the device (or add them on at a later time). But that is beyond the knowledge of most consumers and has other downsides.
So while I do consider this choice to be pretty silly. I do find it hard to draw the line of at what point it is clearly ridiculous.
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
Boss 1 saved 0.02% of the cost of the laptop, but thanks to scale works out to be $2.4m. He walks away with his $240k bonus.
Boss 2 sees increased complaints about Teams and blames Microsoft.
2. Complaints that do not translate into lost sales have no financially actionable relevance. I think you are greatly overestimating the amount that these organizations care. If your job is to sell laptop, money talks.
To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.
But also, HW encoding of some codecs is not always of great quality and doesn't support the advanced features required for RTC, so the CPU encoding code-path is sometimes even forced! While it doesn't necessarily apply to HEVC as you'd need a license for it (and almost all apps rely on the system having one), it's happening for VP9 or AV1 occasionally more frequently.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
If so, time for customers to complain to Microsoft.
If I understand that all correctly blurring is cheap when you already have the raw video data on the gpu for encoding, but introduces too much latency when combined with software encoding.
Software blur should be possible, but the feature has not been implemented and would not be nearly as cheap as it is on the gpu
So if you have a Dell or HP laptop, your hardware acceleration is broken because your experience with the hardware isn't worth $0.04 to the OEM.
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
There's a way to volume license HEVC but only for very specific enterprise categories, others just can't.
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.
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 get your point but wonder why av1 isn't being phased in.
That is their entire profit margin.
It shows how much disdain they have for their customers though, that they won’t at least make it a 25 ¢ line item upgrade for customers who actually care. Instead customers have to pay $20 or whatever for an inferior software decoder.
Why not both? :)
In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
Luckily H.264 High Profile is already patent free in many countries and soon to be patent free in US too. Let's hope AV2 really get its act together this time around. Then the world would just be H.264 as baseline and AV2 for high quality.
My understanding is that the licensing lawyers learned from Cisco doing that with H.264 for Firefox and there isn’t a cap with H.265.
No, the problem is trying to use royalty-bearing formats for internet video. Royalty-free formats like AV1 avoid the problem.
I do look forwards to an open future. But it's no quick solution.
Patent pools consist of a bunch of lawyers seeking to parasitically extract revenue from implementers of the format. They don't do anything else.
They're all going to hike the licencing fees to maximum they can get away with. They will approach businesses and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."
To HP's and Dell's utter astonishment, they have discovered that when you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
What HP and Dell should do instead is focus on royalty-free video formats like VP9, AV1, and the future AV2 and join the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
Firefox is adding non-free codec support like HEVC on the basis that the hardware decoder (reached at through whatever OS API) already has a license.
No double dipping there.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1963910
> In practice it seems everyone in the value chain are forced to pay, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell and then even browser and software.
The fee is payed by the one who makes it "available" to the enduser. AMD and Intel pay nothing, they implement "math" accelerating it, but they do not "provide" it to a customer. The fee is collected by the last one in the chain enabling it for the customer.
So Dell selling a product supporting it out of the box as a complete "experience" is the last in the chain. If e.g. Dell doesn't support it and the user acquires the "enabling piece" from the Microsoft Store, then Microsoft has to pay it. That's why U.S. based Linux distros (backed by a company) disable the codecs, because they would be the last in the chain (e.g. by shipping the "enabler" through mesa). For the same reason Firefox would be on the hook, if they ship the "enabling" part - which they get around for h.264 by providing a blob payed by Oracle or relying on the OS facilities for h.265.
It's also reported that HEVC works fine on Linux on these affected laptops.
Meta: recently it seems like the community has been way too loose with the downvote button, but I'm not sure if I'm just noticing it more because it's getting on my nerves, or if there has actually been a change in behavior.
The term "orange reddit" feels more and more like reality as time goes on.
> "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."?
:)
This used to be the only place that I could visit to get away from Reddit behavior. It seems like the more obscure a social gathering is, the less Eternal September it suffers.
>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
It's like Samsung uses faulty "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor on some of the cheaper phones (including S series FE phones) which results in butt dialing: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/o56uz4/s20_fe_pock... -- seriously, is this the place they need to be frugal?
Or, although this is a matter of more than a few dollars -- all ThinkPad T series screens are terrible with low brightness and 45% NTSC color range, unless your IT department is nice enough to purchase a version with upgraded screen, which is almost guaranteed to never happen.
I used to like to hate on Apple, but these days, I appreciate how they don't cheap out on things so that user never needs to double check a specific thing in the spec sheet and deal with the mess.
>ruin your user experience?
How? Just what software or service does even use HEVC or VVC over H264, VP8/9 and AV1?
If they were approached by mpreg, I cannot blame them for choosing to disable the codecs over paying the racket.
I just wish they made a public statement about it at the time, and were loud about it in their product pages, rather than customers having to find out in this manner.
Name and shame, and recommend customers to use AOM codecs, rather than silently handle it.
Like everything? Its objectively better in every way.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, RDP, Teams, etc...
You'll note that Zoom and Webex aren't listed which is why Teams provides sharper screen sharing with less bandwidth. Its likely they also didn't want to pay the shiny nickel to have happier users.
EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
>EDIT - I left off 4k UHD Blu Ray. Thats a big one.
Is Bluray actually relevant today?
That is incorrect. Youtube chooses the best available automatically. Unless you have a slow network or obsolete device you're probably getting h.265.
Netflix defaults to h265 for their own content because they want it to look good. They let licensed content use the cheaper AOM codecs because they don't care how it looks.
Blu ray is still relevant, especially 4k UHD Blu Ray. It is still the only way to watch most films in decent quality. Streaming services average a bitrate of 8-16 Mbps. A few top out over 35. A 4k UHD Blu Ray averages around 80-130Mbps.
Try watching a horror film on any streaming service. Notice the blocks in the background of dark scenes where the various black levels dither into each other? That's called macroblocking and you'll get it with most/all streaming services because they're low quality. It's not a natural and normal part of the scene. You won't get that with blu ray.
People with large screens, or folks that are just very sensitive to it will always prefer the disk.
That's something to begin with.
Checked. Seems to be h264+aac.
Arguably not a recent phone (OnePlus 3), although I feel no pressure to upgrade.
The current plan is to wait for first Google Pixel using RISC-V. Next year I would say it's fifty-fifty chance, informed by the switch to PowerVR GPU this year on their SoC, and next years expected general availability of RVA23 cores.
VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.
It’s not without precedent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1225432506/apple-watch-blood-...
> no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch ... > customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app
You’re removing the important part. Here’s the full sentence, with emphasis:
> According to the tech giant, customers who purchase the watches in the U.S. will still be able to see Apple's Blood Oxygen app on their devices, but when tapped, users will get a message saying the feature is no longer available.
In other words, you saw the icon for the app but it didn’t work. The feature had been removed even for those who had already paid for it.
Also this was regulatory pressure which is more like act of god in legalese while removal of h265 is more like we decided to screw customers.
If and only if they indeed removed the feature after purchase.
It says that was on new watches, it doesn't say they retroactively removed the feature from old watches.
Not every device includes a HEVC license. For cheap consumer devices or custom built PCs no license is the norm. It just used to be the norm for the premium brands to include the license with every device.
That actually changes the whole gist.
I have a PC that came without the license, and I had to buy it to get everything working. It was more an annoyance than a problem, it's only a 99 cent purchase.
Individual buyers can just buy the HEVC license from the Windows store. I think windows even opens the store, if the codec is missing. A lot of companies disable the public App Store on their MDM though.
If missing licenses impact end users on a larger scale, it's also a communication issue from the manufacturers. This won't do them any good, as customers will be annoyed from the bad user experience. Even if one in 100 customers switches the brand, they make a loss.
Ah well. No HP and Dell laptops then. So long!
Thus much of peoples' photo library is becoming HEVC.
Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.
And for video streaming, AV1 is becoming increasingly used on Youtube and Netflix for example ( https://aomedia.org/av1-adoption-showcase/netflix-story/ )/.
It is used a lot more for people who don't have to worry too much about licensing at scale, such as pirate content or local streaming (quite often backed by an OS wide license). Doing a quick search on various pirate content search engine, I can see a lot of AV1 content now, so it'll eventually get more popular!
And while phones usually have a hardware AV1 decoder, they probably don't have an AV1 encoder.
The internet is built on royalty-free formats and protocols. Video is not special or different.
I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...
Anyway, it's just another example of hardware mfgs not supporting open formats, so we don't need to get too deep in the weeds trying to remember history.
MP3 had mindshare. That's was what people knew and it was what people asked for. People bought MP3 players. People built software that ripped MP3s. The sales guy at the electronics store knew what MP3 was. Everything worked with MP3 and so that was what people bought and downloaded and used.
Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.
* Not sure if consortium is the right word. Racket maybe?
AV1 exists and is both better than HEVC and royalty free. H.264/AVC patents are either expired or rapidly expiring. Their likely end goal is to phase HEVC out completely, avoid VVC, and not have to deal with this licensing system at all anymore. And that makes sense. There's a good chance that practically all manufacturers will start doing this.
For users, does it really matter? AV1 is being adopted faster than HEVC ever was. Beyond that, AVC has always been far more common than HEVC. It likely won't affect you, and if it does, it's easy to fix or will fix itself.
> Play High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) videos in any video app on your Windows 10 device. These extensions are designed to take advantage of hardware capabilities on some newer devices— including those with an Intel 7th Generation Core processor and newer GPU to support 4K and Ultra HD content. For devices that don’t have hardware support for HEVC videos, software support is provided, but the playback experience might vary based on the video resolution and PC performance. These extensions also let you encode HEVC content on devices that don’t have a hardware-based video encoder.
Yes, Windows 10.
> https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-US&gl=U...
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...
HPsquared•2mo ago
adithyassekhar•2mo ago