HP and Dell Disable HEVC Video Support on Laptops to Cut Costs

In a move that has left IT administrators and power users baffled, tech giants HP and Dell have quietly disabled HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) hardware decoding on several of their newest business laptops. Despite these machines shipping with powerful modern processors fully capable of handling high-resolution video, the manufacturers have artificially locked this feature at the factory level.

The reason? A complex web of patent royalties that suggests these multi-billion dollar corporations are crippling hardware performance to save mere cents per unit.

This controversial decision, first brought to light by frustrated system administrators on Reddit and later confirmed by Ars Technica, turns sophisticated "Pro" hardware into devices that struggle to play standard video formats in a web browser—unless the user pays extra to fix it.

The Discovery: Infinite Loading Loops on Brand New Hardware

The issue surfaced not through an official announcement, but through user complaints. IT managers deploying fleets of new Windows laptops began noticing a peculiar bug: specific video files, particularly those encoded in H.265 (HEVC), would refuse to play in web browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. Instead of playing smoothly, the videos would hang in an infinite loading loop.

Upon closer inspection, the problem wasn't a driver failure or a defective chip. It was a deliberate configuration choice.

Which Laptops Are Affected?

The disablement appears to target "mainstream" and "entry-level" business laptops, creating a confusing tiered experience where paying more for a "premium" screen might unlock features that are standard on budget consumer devices.

Confirmed affected models include:

HP: ProBook 400 G11 series, ProBook 600 G11 series, EliteBook 600 G11 series, and select 200 G9 models.
Dell: Various "base" and "standard" configurations of Latitude and other business lines (specifically those without 4K screens or discrete GPUs).

HP has even quietly updated its product datasheets with a disclaimer: "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform."

The "Why": A War Over Cents Per Unit

To the average consumer, it seems nonsensical. The Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and AMD Ryzen processors inside these laptops have dedicated media engines designed specifically to decode HEVC video efficiently, saving battery life and CPU cycles.

The bottleneck isn't silicon; it's intellectual property.

HEVC is a proprietary codec heavily burdened by patent licensing fees. Unlike its predecessor (H.264) or its open-source rival (AV1), manufacturers must pay royalties to multiple patent pools—such as MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media—to enable HEVC support on their devices.

The Cost of Doing Business

While the exact figures fluctuate based on volume and region, the fees are relatively small on a per-unit basis—often ranging from $0.20 to $1.00 per device. However, for companies like HP and Dell that ship tens of millions of units annually, these "micro-fees" aggregate into tens of millions of dollars in operational costs.

With HEVC royalty rates reportedly set to increase in upcoming licensing terms (some reports cite a jump to $0.24 per unit in certain pools), it appears the PC giants decided to cut costs by simply turning the feature off on lower-margin devices.

The Impact on Users: "Pay-to-Play" Hardware

The immediate consequence for users is a degraded experience. Without hardware acceleration:

Browser Failure: Browsers generally rely on the OS and hardware flags to decide if they can play HEVC. If the hardware flag is disabled, the browser often fails to fall back to software decoding correctly, leading to playback errors.
Battery Drain: Even if a video player (like VLC) forces software decoding, the CPU has to do the heavy lifting that the efficient media engine was designed to handle. This results in hotter laptops, loud fans, and significantly reduced battery life during video playback.

The $0.99 Solution

Perhaps the most stinging aspect of this situation is the "fix." Dell's support pages have reportedly advised users facing this issue to purchase the HEVC Video Extensions app from the Microsoft Store.

The cost? $0.99.

This effectively shifts the licensing burden directly onto the consumer. After buying an $800+ enterprise laptop, the user is asked to pay a dollar to unlock a capability that is physically present in the silicon they already purchased.

Future Outlook: The Rise of AV1 and the End of HEVC?

This debacle highlights the precarious future of the HEVC format. While it offers excellent compression quality, its licensing complexity has been a stranglehold on its adoption.

The industry is increasingly pivoting toward AV1, a royalty-free, open-source codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media (which includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Netflix). AV1 offers similar or better compression than HEVC without the legal headaches.

However, AV1 adoption is a long game. Millions of terabytes of video content exist in HEVC today, from iPhone recordings to streaming libraries. By disabling support now, HP and Dell are creating a fragmentation nightmare for IT departments, forcing them to manage "codec capability" as yet another variable in their hardware fleet.

For now, buyers of business laptops need to be more vigilant than ever. Checking the specs for CPU and RAM is no longer enough; you now have to check if the manufacturer has decided to turn those features on.