HP and Dell have disabled support for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard in some of their laptops. Ars Technica Report. HEVC is a codec that enables large videos to be compressed into smaller files while maintaining their quality. Sixth-generation Intel Core chips and later, as well as AMD chips made in the last 10 years, come with built-in support for the standard. But as some HP and Dell owners shared on Reddit, they encountered an infinite loading screen when they tried to view HEVC content on browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Ars Technica Found documentation for some HP business laptop models, including the HP ProBook 460 G11, ProBook 465 G11, and EliteBook 665 G11, that states: “Hardware acceleration for Codec H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform.” Dell doesn’t explicitly mention disabling support for HEVC, but it does have a support page that states that streaming HEVC content is only possible on devices with specific configurations.
To be clear, users will still be able to play HEVC videos on programs like VLC and Windows Media Player. However, users with affected laptops will have to deal with broken videos when attempting to play anything on their browsers that use the standard. HP told arse It disabled HEVC on select devices in 2024 and encouraged people to use “licensed third-party software solutions” instead. Meanwhile, Dell told the publication that its premium laptops still support HEVC video. For users with base and standard laptops that can no longer run them, the company also encourages the use of third-party software.
The companies didn’t explain why they decided to turn off HEVC playback for some models, but did say arse Note, this may be associated with increasing license fees. After September 30 this year, royalty rates for the HEVC codec went from 20 cents to 24 cents per unit for units over 100,001. HP and Dell are two of the largest laptop manufacturers in the world, so that’s a big chunk of money.