The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to extend in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the USA. To place that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.
Last 12 months, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, in addition to H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, resembling 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 in comparison with traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.
Despite the growing costs and complications with HEVC licenses and workarounds, breaking features which have been widely available for years will likely result in confusion and frustration.
“That is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are a part of a ‘Pro’ line (jabs at branding names are warranted – HEVC is used professionally), and more applications lately outside of Netflix and streaming TV are getting around to adopting HEVC,” a Redditor wrote.