I feel like I'm missing something here. What do the manufacturers have to do with this, beyond perhaps including HEVC in advertising content? That's on the GPU maker, AFAIK asus/acer practically purchase them from a catalog and build the rest around that size/shape

Edit: if its the licensing fee, that's on the OS and/or end user, not the hardware

There’s another patent suit with Disney+ over HDR, or maybe the same thing, in Germany right now, too.

Maybe they're including the unlicensed codec in their computers.

Ahh, if that's the case, i have no sympathy for fucking with a stock OS before handing it to the user. Nobody likes vendor bloatware

This is patent troll right?
If I am to trust wikipedia, Nokia had nothing to do with the development of HEVC.

The HEVC format was jointly developed by more than a dozen organisations across the world. The majority of active patent contributions towards the development of the HEVC format came from five organizations: Samsung Electronics (4,249 patents), General Electric (1,127 patents),[10] M&K Holdings (907 patents), NTT (878 patents), and JVC Kenwood (628 patents).[11] Other patent holders include Fujitsu, Apple, Canon, Columbia University, KAIST, Kwangwoon University, MIT, Sungkyunkwan University, Funai, Hikvision, KBS, KT and NEC.[12]

Also:

When the MPEG LA terms were announced, commenters noted that a number of prominent patent holders were not part of the group. Among these were AT&T, Microsoft, Nokia, and Motorola. Speculation at the time was that these companies would form their own licensing pool to compete with or add to the MPEG LA pool

Something doesn't seem right.

I like the news not because I think Asus and Acer should be paying more royalties to the whichever ghoul in the patent web there is but because every-time something like this happens it’s another hit against support for hevc and its nearly 6 year old successor that’s gotten little to no relevant adoption in mobile or desktop hardware. AV2 will publish its final standard 6 years after VVC and pretty much not be behind at all because of how crappy the patent situation is for hevc and vvc

Not even if it's a free codec you'd normally have to pay for?

Id be questioning what else they changed that I don't see

I mean it's probably not going to be much shadier than the OS itself. Fuck Windows.

No, Nokia do own a bunch of patents on it, I'm pretty sure they also created (and have patents on) the HEIF format used in HEIC/AVIF as well.

Edit: search results were failing me, but here's a couple.

https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2013/03/18/h-265hevc-high-quality-video-at-half-the-bandwidth/
https://mspoweruser.com/nokia-details-its-contribution-to-h-265hevc-hints-at-integration-in-devices/

Thanks for doing the search.

If it's free, you're the product.

Pretty sure they just include it to get fewer returns ("My computer doesn't play videos!") and Acer and Asus here opted to do it without paying the license fee.

Some manufacturers do include far more nefarious shit though. You're right there. I don't know who includes what these days, last Windows laptop I bought was a dv6-2000 series HP Pavilion. That was horrific before a clean install of Windows 7, and then slightly later, a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10, my first foray into Linux :)

Now I wish I could put new internals in the ol' HP and it's probably possible with a tiny SBC, but I think I threw it away because it was half-molten anyway. Loved the "Espresso" design.

So AV1 is not free?

AV1 isn't a paid product being given away for free.