On my new laptop, whenever opening a h265 I would get message from the media player saying I can buy HEVC for $3 or something.

But if you follow the link below to the Windows store, you can download it for free!

ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq

Found out on Howtogeek

https://www.howtogeek.com/680690/how-to-install-free-hevc-co...

Yeah, I had to buy it. I suspect maybe depending on your manufacturer your machine already has a license?

maybe i misunderstood, then. i thought that HEVC licensing was paid for by the hardware vendor, and hence acted as a broad tax even if you’re not using HEVC, or using GPUs in a HPC context, etc (and unnecessarily raises the barrier of entry to new HW vendors, etc). but if Windows users are individually paying those licenses, that’s probably not the case.

i guess the worry then is that HEVC crowds out AV1/others, and this Chrome change is setting the stage for it to become a broad tax on video? i could buy that angle.

There was a recent kerfuffle about Fedora removing support for hardware accelerated H.265 from their distribution of mesa because of threat of patent litigation. See https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API. That would also seem to suggest that the OS has to pay royalties if it uses hardware acceleration. It seems pretty strange to me that the OS/library/driver has to pay royalties just to expose access to hardware, which is where the patented technology actually exists. But I also don't understand how a video codec can be patented in the first place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ IANAL.