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

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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

das_stig Time to dump HEVC support and make room in hardware for open source 1. Stick with x264/x265, open source, solid and proven if a little less capable. 2. Support HEVC Kvazaar. 3. Move to AV1 but that means giving Google too much sway. 4. Develop a new open source codec for the next 25 years. Reply

bit_user When do the H.265 patents expire? That's what I want to know. I think the patent holders are putting on the squeeze, because they see that the technology has probably reached max penetration and are now seeking to extract as much revenue from it as possible, while they still can. Edit: Wikipedia claims there was a patent filed in 2001, but not granted until 2016. That pushes the date that H.265 becomes unencumbered back to Nov. 2030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Licensing Reply

bit_user das_stig said: Time to dump HEVC support and make room in hardware for open source 1. Stick with x264/x265, open source, solid and proven if a little less capable. 2. Support HEVC Kvazaar. Open source doesn't help. The mere fact of using an open source implementation doesn't save companies from needing to license the patents. All it means is that you potentially don't have to pay an additional fee to license an implementation. You'll note that companies which redistribute these open source codec libraries in freely-available packages, such as major Linux distros, exclude support for codecs which are still patent-protected. das_stig said: 3. Move to AV1 but that means giving Google too much sway. 4. Develop a new open source codec for the next 25 years. Using the royalty-free codecs is the only way you can avoid the legal obligation to pay royalties. AV1 is the latest and greatest, but other options include: OGG Theora VP8 & VP9 MPEG-4 part 2 / H.263 (patents expired) Anything even older (e.g. MPEG-2) Reply

ezst036 dimar said: Just to save like $2 per device? Wouldn't that affect battery life? I'd never recommend HP anyway, but something doesn't add-up here. If they're only going to sell 50 computers, $2 doesn't sound like a big deal. They'll probably sell more than 50 computers though. And for battery life the driver probably re-routes to another codec that's free, making the difference null. Reply

chemistu I just looked at Wikipedia – it shows HVEC as covered by 8738 separate patents claimed by 36 separate companies (the only reachable document listing them I could find was this hevc-att1. Fifty Seven Pages of it). This seeems insane. Reply

bit_user chemistu said: I just looked at Wikipedia – it shows HVEC as covered by 8738 separate patents claimed by 36 separate companies (the only reachable document listing them I could find was this hevc-att1. Fifty Seven Pages of it). This seeems insane. Yeah, software patents are kinda nuts. They're issued way too easily. I think video compression is a particularly fraught area, since it's one that's fairly easy to monetize (i.e. just submit a claim to the MPEG Licensing Authority and take your share of the royalties). Reply

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  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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

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