OEMs are disabling codec hardware as costs related to the international video compression standard are set to rise in January, licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Royalty rates for HEVCs are rising from $0.20 each to $0.24 for units over 100,001 in the United States, according to analysis by the patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance. To put this in perspective, in Q3 2025, according to Gartner, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops.
Last year, NAS company Synology announced it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for the video codecs is widespread on 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 especially effective in high-user environments compared to traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.
Despite the increasing costs and complexities with HEVC licenses and workarounds, breaking features that have been widely available for years will cause confusion and frustration.
“This is pretty ridiculous, given that these systems are $800+ per machine, are part of a ‘Pro’ line (poking at the branding names is essential – HEVCs are used professionally), and more applications outside of Netflix and streaming TV are getting ready to adopt HEVCs these days,” wrote one Redditor.