Clarifying HEVC licensing fees, royalties, and why vendors kill HEVC support - Ars Technica

You don’t notice good video compression—until it’s not there.

For years, people have streamed high-resolution video without thinking about the tech behind it. But when companies clash over which hardware, software, and services can use modern codecs like HEVC/H.265, the idea that it all “just works” quickly falls apart.

For some Dell and HP customers, that illusion has already been shattered. When the companies disabled HEVC support built into the CPUs of select PCs, it raised uncomfortable questions: Why remove a capability that’s already a part of third-party hardware? What do OEMs and chipmakers pay to support HEVC—and are HEVC patent holders effectively double-dipping on licensing fees and royalties?

Implementing video codecs requires navigating an intricate web of technical and legal requirements built atop an even more complex patent licensing system. Recent consolidation among key parties, leading to “patent pools,” along with court rulings and new standards, has further complicated the picture.

We spoke with experts to unpack how HEVC patent licensing works for consumer products, why patent holders are suing, why some users are being forced to pay for the codec, and whether there’s a better option.

Tech vendors discuss killing HEVC support

A lot of video content, especially 4K and HDR offerings, uses the HEVC video compression format. Streaming services like Netflix and Apple TV+ use it for high-resolution playback, and it’s also common in mobile apps and videos shot on smartphones. That’s largely because it’s far more efficient than its predecessor, AVC/H.264.

So when a company disables hardware-based HEVC encoding and decoding support from a computer, it can create headaches. 4K and HDR streams on services like Netflix and Apple TV+ stop working in web browsers and desktop apps, for instance. An HEVC shot on an iPhone won’t play on many apps, including web browsers and some media players, like Windows’ Movies & TV. And tasks like editing and exporting HEVC videos in Adobe Premiere Pro become slower, since all the decoding and encoding must be handled by software instead of the PC’s hardware.

In these cases, users can pay for an HEVC video extension to restore hardware acceleration—the Microsoft Store sells it for $1—but it’s a frustrating ask when that capability was intentionally disabled. Another workaround is to play HEVC files in software with built-in decoding, such as VLC Media Player. That only goes so far, though—you can’t, for example, download a 4K episode of a show from Netflix and play it in VLC.

The technologies required for HEVC decoding and encoding are patented by several companies, including Ericsson, InterDigital, and Nokia. For a product to use HEVC, its vendor must pay licensing fees and royalties to the relevant patent holders. Those fees vary depending on whether the vendor licensed the patent directly from the licensor or through a third party.

In recent years, several tech companies have killed HEVC functionality in devices originally built to support the codec. Dell and HP disabled HEVC support that has been in Intel and AMD CPUs since 2015. In 2024, Synology removed HEVC, AVC, and VC-1 transcoding support from the DiskStation Manager (DSM) OS used in Synology NAS devices and the BeeStation OS used in its BeeStation private cloud devices.

Acer and Asus have even been prohibited from selling PCs in Germany since January due to a Munich Regional Court ruling that the companies’ computers infringe on one of Nokia’s HEVC patents.

An HP spokesperson previously told Ars that in 2024, the company disabled HEVC codec hardware on “select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products.” The spokesperson declined to explain why.

Most of the devices HP named don’t offer discrete graphics cards or 4K screens, suggesting that the PCs aren’t intended for high-resolution workloads. HP listed at least one affected model, the ProBook 460 G11, that offers a discrete GPU ( PDF ), but that SKU seems to have seen little availability at traditional retailers. Given that, HP may have determined that these lower-end business laptops are unlikely to be used for high-resolution video and therefore don’t justify the patent fees and potential litigation risk tied to giving them HEVC support.