HEVC licensing gets more expensive in January.
    • Gerowen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    They are disabling it because the license cost went up 4 cents? Just pass that cost onto the customer. Even if they mark that up several times, I would rather pay that than have my battery drained because I have to software decode a video.

    There is still a lot of H.265 content out there. I have many terabytes of it that I don’t want to transcode.

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    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?

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      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