HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs
The deactivation of codec hardware by OEMs also comes as costs associated with the international video compression standard are expected to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. According to an analysis by the VIA Licensing Alliance Patent Pool Administration, royalty rates for HEVC for more than 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that in perspective, in the third quarter of 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, according to Gartner.
Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC transcoding, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread across end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”
“This update reduces unnecessary resource usage on the server and significantly improves media processing efficiency. The optimization is particularly effective in high-consumption environments compared to traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.
Despite the increasing costs and complications of HEVC licensing and workarounds, disruptive features that have been widely available for years will likely lead to confusion and frustration.
“This is pretty ridiculous, considering these systems cost over $800 per machine, are part of a ‘Pro’ line (the brand names are justified – HEVC is used professionally), and more and more applications these days outside of Netflix and streaming TV are moving to adopt HEVC,” one Redditor wrote.
