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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone please explain why we need this as Windows users?

I never had to pay for any codecs as they always came bundled with my video player of choice (Pot, Gom, VLC, etc.)

Is this for people who don't know about third party video players?

A lot of phones, iPhone and Samsung at least that I know of, save photos in HEIF format by default, which does require HEVC to decode.

Huh? Every phone I had had photos in Jpeg format.

Well, now you know.

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.

Newer phones can support HDR too, which needs HEIF.

Yeah an iPhone user sent me some photos recently - HEI something - Chrome rendered them fine but Windows Explorer doesn't know how to deal with them.

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.

In the EU patent office, software patents are not a thing. So good riddance to them.

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.

If you want video playback to work in software that embeds a system-provided video player, like Edge.

to be fair it isn’t even implemented in chrome

Chrome doesn't use the system codecs. That means you would have to pay separately to use a (hypothetical) HEVC decoder distributed with Chrome.

Technically you’re supposed to be paying for the codec packs you download as well.

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