There have been multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities found in the HEVC extension, and it doesn't seem like this has been updated since the initial release. Definitely would not install this.
Could it be that Microsoft is selling the codec extension because MPEG-LA would otherwise ask them to pay a fee for every single Windows installation with the codec included? and since Windows is very often pirated Microsoft would be paying fees for installations nobody paid for, effectively losing money.
Microsoft wouldn’t be paying licensing fees for pirated software as their platform includes sufficient protections against piracy. Currently with activation and formerly with serial codes.
It’s just a method of reducing cost - Microsoft did the same with the DVD playing codec. Their own DVD player wouldn’t function until a 3rd party codec was installed.
One should also think back to Microsoft’s approach to fonts. Where they made Frankenfonts instead of licensing the real ones.
> as their platform includes sufficient protections against piracy
You are joking, right? KMS activation is a total no-brainer, most of the times it is even already included in the build iso, so it "just works".
I always thought that everyone kinda understood that MS has been using piracy as a mean to popularize it's OS. Let some individual in Russia use pirated Windows, you will be paid anyway when this kid gets a job and starts using Windows in enterprise.
Precisely, the parent post is being
facetious.
It’s the same as why we have basic locks on our homes even though a drill can open it in less than 30 seconds.
No being free doesn't help them. Linux is distro dependent but generally it's not distributed by any large US company. Community projects play loose with using patented software. Apple surely licenses it.
Apple pays in order to distribute the codec on their devices, and since hackintoshes are very uncommon and iOS can't be installed anywhere else they aren't worried about those rare cases. Also Linux has nothing to do with video codecs.
Microsoft and Apple have to pay because they are based in the U.S. VLC claims to get away with it because they're in France but the situation is not totally clear.
This feels gross, but if the codec costs Microsoft money I don't think I inherently have a problem with it? The alternative is that the cost is built into the price of Windows, and all Windows users have to pay for it even if they only use patent-free codecs.
Companies never take a price hit for their customers, even if it's 1$. Shareholders would be furious.
Even Apple said that all the added price of fairer labor practices in China (and the cost of anti-suicide nets on Foxconn factories), will be passed on to the consumers in the product prices.
Unfair comparison. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't sell the OS to consumers though, it sells you a whole device, or better, a whole ecosystem, who's profit margins are way higher than what Microsoft makes from selling $99/$139 Windows licenses to consumers, so of course they can afford to eat the cost.
>Firstly, Microsoft's profit margins are significantly higher than Apple's
I was talking about profits Microsoft exclusively makes from selling the $99/$139 Windows licenses to consumer, not the profits of Microsoft entirely. Two different vastly different things.
>Second -- how much do you think Microsoft makes from selling a $99/$139 license? They can most definitely, absolutely, without a doubt afford to eat the cost.
I dunno. How much does it make selling an OS at the price of two video games, while supporting it with updates for 10 years and paying devs US salaries to work on it for those 10 years?
Enterprise customers are Microsoft's bread and butter as those also buy the full AD, Azure, O365, Outlook, etc. package plus pay for support, but I can't imagine they make much money selling just an OS and 10 years worth of development for only $99/$139 to consumers who don't buy anything else out of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Keep in mind that Windows 95 retail box would cost consumers $209($409 in today's money), and you imagine that Microsoft is now making a huge profit on selling Windows to consumers today at 25% the original price with the much higher complexity and development costs of today's software?
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the consumer $99/$139 price points are actually loosing Microsoft money, similar how consoles are doing, but Microsoft is subsidizing it from the enterprise profits, to maintain the Windows market share monopoly, otherwise consumers would just switch to Linux if they had to pay more than a hundo for Windows.
In fact, you don't even have to pay for Windows (legal gray area). I activated my Windows 11 Pro copy with some CD key from Windows 7 I found online and it activated just fine. If Microsoft was actually making a profit on selling Windows licenses to consumers, they would have some serious DRM in place that would rival that of video-games, but the way I see it, it's not making them any money, which is why they don't bother enforcing even the most basic kinds of DRM, which in turn, explains to me why they penny pinch the $0.99.
Windows Enterprise is a superset of consumer Windows, so, given the existence of the former, the marginal development cost of consumer Windows is limited to the comparatively modest set of Windows features that few enterprise users care about — many of which are directly attributable to gaming, which, like Office, is another solid Microsoft revenue stream — plus any additional costs associated with producing and distributing multiple editions of Windows with different feature subsets.
Moreover, I believe Microsoft no longer charges for consumer Windows upgrades because they save more money by supporting fewer distinct versions of Windows (with security patches and compatibility with other Microsoft products sold to consumers like Office and games) than they previously made on consumer version upgrades.
Finally, the overwhelming majority of consumer Windows license sales are to OEMs bundling Windows with new PCs, and these licenses offload the burden of frontline technical support on the PC vendor.
Taking all these things into account, it would actually surprise me to learn that Microsoft loses money on consumer Windows.
As for "serious DRM", are you certain this would actually increase Windows sales enough to offset lost revenue (Office, Game Pass, search advertising, etc.) from consumers who would otherwise be running pirated Windows?
So what to make of the 99¢ codec charge? My guess is lawyers: one could make a reasonable argument that there is no material difference between bundling HEVC with Windows and making it available as a free download for all Windows users.
> I was talking about profits Microsoft exclusively makes from selling the $99/$139 Windows licenses to consumer, not the profits of Microsoft entirely. Two different vastly different things.
How exactly are you calculating Apple's margin on macOS and iOS? How are you attributing the sales price hardware to macOS/iOS, hardware, apps, tools and services, iWork, Photos, iMovie?
> I dunno. How much does it make selling an OS at the price of two video games, while supporting it with updates for 10 years and paying devs US salaries to work on it for those 10 years?
An absolute metric boatload.
> Keep in mind that Windows 95 retail box would cost consumers $209($409 in today's money), and you imagine that Microsoft is now making a huge profit on selling Windows to consumers today at 25% the original price with the much higher complexity and development costs of today's software?
Yes, that's how economies of scale work.
Windows 95 seems to have sold 40M copies total [1] whereas they sold about a billion copies of Windows 10 by 2019. [2]
When I first started my career, I was the tech responsible for something like this.
The "crippling" of GPS lookup times and accuracy in cell phones. This was network assisted GPS locations, and each hit to the assistance server cost the carrier money (just the way it was licensed from the vendor IIRC). But RIM added a free maps app that would allow users to look up against the assistance server without having GPS in their plan (when it was a separate option).
The funny part was, when I applied the change, the tests didn't seem to work, and rolled it back within an hour or two. This was overnight, so when everyone woke up, they started testing their GPS and decided they'd been blocked and made a giant stink on internet forums, and the entire project was cancelled and never re-attempted.
My Samsung A40 camera started saving in that other format after an update a few months ago. I noticed because I couldn't open them I don't remember where. I reverted the setting to JPEG.
VLC's inclusion of HEVC and DSS likely make it legally dubious in the US and many other areas. They claim that their jurisdiction does not believe in software patents and they do not owe license fees, but while IANAL even if true that makes zero claims about use of the software in jurisdictions where those patents do exist.
I wish the law was as clear-cut as this. The can of worms in this case is called a 'computer implemented invention'. As I understand it, something patentable outside the algorithmic world does not lose its patentability status simply by being implemented by an algorithm. If you turn that around, if you can implement something without software, it might be patentable.
As a hardware-only implementation of these video codecs is possible, they might be patentable. And then the software implementations would also fall under the patent.
Lucky for us, this is the point where EU law fragments into a zillion national laws, and each country court would decide something different. So corporations tend to not even try to enforce these patents, even if they acquired it. Unfortunately, the Unified Patent Court was created to clarify things like this, so expect this unstable status quo not to endure forever.
Now IANAL and reasoning beyond my competence, so I'd love some other HNers to tell me more.
Why? It's the successor to h264. The link in the OP is a hardware entitlement, since GPUs/CPUs now have h265 hardware encoder/decoders, so you already legally purchased rights when you bought a compatible device.
I prefer having a newer codec with superior quality/size. The only reason you wouldn't use HEVC is if your hardware lacks support, the $0.99 version is for the ability to use the codec in software. It's illegal to use it without licensing, but like most things, hard to enforce. Mostly for company compliance.
> The only reason you wouldn't use HEVC is if your hardware lacks support
No, the main problem with HEVC is that it is not licensed under royalty-free terms. In contrast, almost all commonly used internet formats and protocols are licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone is free to use and implement them without paying a licensing fee. Video has been an anomaly.
Imagine if HTML wasn't licensed under royalty-free terms. Or TCP/IP or HTTP or SMTP or any other internet format or protocol that you (probably) use every day. There's no reason why video needs to be a special case here.
Fortunately, video formats like AV1 (https://aomedia.org/) and audio formats like Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) exist for high quality, royalty-free video and audio coding.
These formats are deployed in the real world right now. YouTube, for example, makes extensive use of both. If you have a browser which supports AV1 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, but not Safari yet), you can see if a YouTube video is playing back in AV1 by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for Nerds".
AV1 is an open standard and and can also be included in open source software. It has the same capabilities as HEVC, but without the patent bs. AV1 decoders/encoders are also already being included by hardware, like in the new Intel ARC cards.
A slightly on-topic question... I have an AMD GPU that supposedly supports AV1 decoding but wouldn't work in VLC which I usually use. I googled and apparently VLC doesn't support AV1 hardware decoding.
Anyone know how I can play AV1 using hardware decoding?
The origin is that Windows 10 was a free upgrade (as Windows 11). Microsoft had similar codecs as optional in the past. It's all about licensing.
OEM can have their codec from elsewhere as any modern GPU includes it and pays licensing fees.
As a reminder, also Apple had similar things back in the days. Sadly I can not remember what it was good enough to find it. It was related to camera or video codec maybe a long time ago. (Hope someone remembers what it was)
I don't have any issues with MS selling a software codec that requires royalty fees, but it is a kinda dark practice not to use the same hardware codec by default when it is available.
Right now it is surely confusing that MS defaults to suggesting paying for a software codec, when most have already paid for it in hardware they are using.
I bought a car dashcam a few weeks ago, and it only records h265. When trying to playback a 1 minute video, VLC might decode one frame, worthless for dashcam videos. I thought that I might have to buy this codec, but I tried MPC-HC and they all played fine.
>> HEVC Advance will not seek a license or royalties on HEVC functionality implemented in application layer software downloaded to mobile devices or personal computers after the initial sale of the device, where the HEVC encoding or decoding is fully executed in software on a general purpose CPU.
From the product description,
>> These extensions are designed to take advantage of hardware capabilities on some newer devices— including those with an Intel 7th Generation Core processor and newer GPU
So it would appear that the codec does not conform to the requirements of the free license.
Equally it implies that the codec cannot be bundled in Windows itself (license free) as that is not "application software".
I get that charging 99c seems petty for a company making billions, but it does have the effect of "counting" licensees. In other words it is not a hindrance to those who need it, but it stops ms from having to pay on the count of "every windows copy sold". I don't have any insight on the actual license cost - it may be pennies, or it may be substantially > $1 - but the 99c does make an accurate counter.
HEVC Advance is not the only patent licensing administrator company for HEVC. It doesn't matter what HEVC Advance says about their patent licenses when other HEVC patent pools can say something different:
I love (not really) how everyone decided that this comment to be killed (it was before I vouched for it) while this comment is saying plain truth - in this case hardware decoding for MPEG2 codecs (https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/)
Copy/paste this link into the browser:
ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Or, open command prompt, and type/paste:
start ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Click “Install”.
Source: https://reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/j58y6f/no_longer_fre...