> For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24
If I understood the article correctly, you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store. All stakeholders win. Licensor. OEM. Microsoft. We made the pie bigger!
Well, maybe not so great for the end user or the IT department.
Let's just say unless you are buying Windows Enterprise the deployment method of this is basically unmanageable for businesses. Like... individuals need their own Microsoft accounts to buy it for their own PC sort of unmanageable.
There's a way to volume license HEVC but only for very specific enterprise categories, others just can't.
In almost every other way, Dell is probably the most manageable hardware OEM. Fantastic support for automatable, scripted driver and firmware updates, a very consistent and unified platform, easily hot-swappable parts, and a great on-site repair coverage.
I think what's happening here is not that HP and Dell don't want to pay the four cents a device, but as it reflects a 20% price increase in the license, they are "drawing a line" for the license company that increasing cost will cost them money, not make them money. I suspect if it works this problem will resolve itself next year, it just sucks for customers.
>you can re-enable this by making a purchase on the Microsoft Store.
That is just a software decoder running on the CPU.
HP and Dell are effectively killing any way to hardware-decode (and encode?) HEVC on these models. Which is a thing you want on a power- and heat-limited device such as a laptop.
If it were, they could 20x their margin numbers by raising prices $1 across the board.
It shows how much disdain they have for their customers though, that they won’t at least make it a 25 ¢ line item upgrade for customers who actually care. Instead customers have to pay $20 or whatever for an inferior software decoder.
I don't think it's fair to blame HP and Dell here; the greed of MPEG LA, which is increasing its licensing price, is the cause. It's problematic to globally allow the patent system and this kind of licensing; it's a real brake on innovation (and here we have proof of it). VP9 and AV1, for example, are not affected because they are free and open source.
VP9 and AV1 are less affected not because they're free and open source, but because they're backed by large-enough companies (Google) and a consortium that promised they won't claim royalties for the patents used in the formats. Companies outside Google or the consortium can still claim royalties, and indeed they do. See the Sisvel VP9/AV1 patent pool for an example of patent holders claiming royalties for technologies used in VP9 and AV1.
I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?
It doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
But it is still more performant to do so in general. There are more image corrections of great quality happening than just background removal nowadays, like lighting improvements or sometimes upscaling, and you wouldn't want to do all that on the CPU.
But also, HW encoding of some codecs is not always of great quality and doesn't support the advanced features required for RTC, so the CPU encoding code-path is sometimes even forced! While it doesn't necessarily apply to HEVC as you'd need a license for it (and almost all apps rely on the system having one), it's happening for VP9 or AV1 occasionally more frequently.
Hmm.. I guess if this explains why my new work Dell Latitude becomes extremely laggy and unstable when doing Teams meetings with multiple video streams. My 5+ year older Dell Latitude did not have this problem.
Nope, boss2 fixes those complaints and gets the relevant complaint rate down by 300%. Everybody conveniently forgets why it was so high in the first place.
1. I doubt that there is much if any overlap between companies that simultaneously do not evaluate the requirements thoroughly for the laptops that they purchase, but also are able to trace an issue with Microsoft teams down to a processor feature specification in the laptops that they've purchased, and that there are enough of these companies that they create a statistically relevant number of complaints to the upstream vendor
2. Complaints that do not translate into lost sales have no financially actionable relevance. I think you are greatly overestimating the amount that these organizations care. If your job is to sell laptop, money talks.
The fear may also be that if they pay this there will be further increases in the price. its going up 20% in a few months. What if they think it will double next time, and then in another year etc?
Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.
To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
HEVC is far from being the most popular codec on the planet in the context of video conferencing. Most implementations are using WebRTC and as it is unevenly supported and AV1 support is becoming more prominent and stable, most implementations are going from H264/VP8 -> VP9 -> AV1 and skip HEVC entirely.
Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.
You are right that a customer won't balk at a $1 price increase, but -- customers balking at $1 isn't the reason why value engineering has won in the marketplace.
If they ship, say 20m laptops a year that's $800k. I can't imagine what cars their executives are dinging if their repair is orders of magnitude more than that. How many orders is it?
And if you've made $50 on each, that's literally a BILLION dollars in profit, and if their financials are true, that would be 1/22nd of their FY2024 profits. So you would be responsible for the bottom line going down by 0.0036%.
I don't know why you're saying this. Doesn't seem related. The point is that if the price goes up now then it can go up again, and where does it end? This process is how prices are kept in check, and is why laptops don't cost $1m each.
Isn't there a certification for ms teams for pcs? I've seen a lot of headsets and speakers with a "certified for ms teams" badge on it. I guess Microsoft needs to extend it to laptops too, make hevc support mandatory and tell their customers.
And does the background blurring part of their pipeline somehow consume the raw H.265 bitstream directly..? Wouldn't they be blurring based on the raw pixel buffer, before any encoding takes place?
Someone elsewhere in the thread replied that it has to do with the blurring happening on the GPU combined with bandwidth issues reading that dataset back followed by software encoding the video.
If I understand that all correctly blurring is cheap when you already have the raw video data on the gpu for encoding, but introduces too much latency when combined with software encoding.
Software blur should be possible, but the feature has not been implemented and would not be nearly as cheap as it is on the gpu
So HP and Dell, two companies well knows for business laptops, sell some laptops with degraded video conferencing, all to save $0.24 per laptop? And Dell doesn't even mention this in the spec sheet or give you a straight list which models are affected?
I can't help but think that the reputational damage from "my new Dell laptop sucks with Teams, the previous one with worse specs was fine" is going to be a lot more expensive long-term than those $0.24