Acer and Asus halt PC and laptop sales in Germany amid H.265 codec patent dispute — Nokia wins patent ruling, forcing tech giants to license HEVC codec

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Acer and Asus can't sell their PCs in Germany until they reach an agreement with Nokia about the use of HEVC.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
(Image credit: Future)

Acer and Asus have temporarily stopped selling desktop and laptop PCs in Germany after a German court granted Nokia an injunction prohibiting the sale of their products. According to HardwareLuxx [machine translated], the two manufacturers are prohibited from “offering, placing on the market, using, or importing or possessing such devices in Germany.”

The High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or H.265 video compression standard is at the heart of this case, with Nokia alleging that Acer, Asus, and the TV manufacturer Hisense are infringing three patents relating to the standard. Hisense decided to purchase a license from the company in January, but Acer and Asus are still fighting out the allegations in court.

HEVC is considered a standard-essential patent (SEP) due to its widespread use. This technology is supported by almost all integrated GPUs, discrete GPUs, and SoCs and is essential to many operating systems, streaming applications, video conferencing services, and other software. Although there are alternatives such as AV1, not implementing HEVC on a PC would significantly impact the user experience, making it virtually a requirement for every computer manufacturer.

This wasn’t a problem for OEMs before, as their suppliers typically covered all license requirements for using specific technologies. However, it appears that both Acer and Asus have encountered issues in their HEVC implementation, prompting both companies to suspend sales of all affected products. Because of HEVC’s SEP status, Nokia must license it on FRAND or Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory terms. Although the two companies state that they respect intellectual property, Germany has a stricter interpretation of FRAND regulations and has determined that both infringe Nokia’s patents.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Why does the title say H.264? That's MPEG-4 AVC.

    H.265 is the ITU-T's name for MPEG-4 HEVC.
    Reply
  • wakuwaku
    Sometimes you wonder, maybe it's the human than is hallucinating, not the AI. When you ask the AI, indeed you get hevc is h.265, and avc is h.264. When you ask Tom, its the other way around.....so tell me again which is the AI and which is the human?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    wakuwaku said:
    Sometimes you wonder, maybe it's the human than is hallucinating, not the AI.
    I'm just going on pure speculation, but I sometimes wonder if they use some kind of tool or AI to "punch up" the article headlines and get them to draw more clicks.

    I wouldn't even have a big problem with it, so long as they adhere to accuracy. Yet, that's not always the case. And that part is true, whether or not any sort of tool or AI is involved. Inaccurate and misleading headlines are getting noticeably more common, here.
    Reply
  • erazog
    The claim H.265 not being part of the computer would adversely affect the experience is incorrect in my opinion, H.264 is the defacto standard used everywhere, the H.265/HEVC variant is barely used by comparison for internet streaming video.

    Loss of H.265 support would affect some portions of the market but not a deal breaker.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    erazog said:
    The claim H.265 not being part of the computer would adversely affect the experience is incorrect in my opinion, H.264 is the defacto standard used everywhere, the H.265/HEVC variant is barely used by comparison for internet streaming video.
    Yeah, H.265 was stuck in licensing limbo for far too long to be considered essential for anything other than UHD blu-ray playback.

    I'm sure all streaming sites will fall back on some other codec, if H.265 isn't available.
    Reply
  • ivanthechemist
    bit_user said:
    Yeah, H.265 was stuck in licensing limbo for far too long to be considered essential for anything other than UHD blu-ray playback.

    I'm sure all streaming sites will fall back on some other codec, if H.265 isn't available.
    Yeah, but it's not only that. Many phones shoot photos in HEIC and record videos in HEVC. Not to mention that bandwidth consumption increases with AVC compared to HEVC, and quality drops significantly (or both). Don't even get me started on things like OBS for streaming or on a lot of the built-in functionality for recording gameplay. While all tools have workarounds, they are just workarounds that underdeliver on what top-of-the-line devices should deliver. Both companies offer high-end premium gaming laptops, which are expected to deliver, if not for consumers, at least to preserve the companies' image.

    In simpler terms, if a computer doesn't support HEVC, I won't buy it. At this point, I am even looking at AV1 hardware acceleration.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ivanthechemist said:
    Yeah, but it's not only that. Many phones shoot photos in HEIC and record videos in HEVC.
    Okay, fair point. I don't watch much phone-sourced video directly on my PC, but I'll grant you that.

    I wonder how many phones don't have a built in way to transcode their videos to another codec...

    ivanthechemist said:
    While all tools have workarounds, they are just workarounds that underdeliver on what top-of-the-line devices should deliver.
    But, that's a different argument than saying it's essential.

    ivanthechemist said:
    if a computer doesn't support HEVC, I won't buy it. At this point, I am even looking at AV1 hardware acceleration.
    Not me. Any GPU I own, where I care to do video playback, supports AV1. That's a fully-acceptable alternative for streaming videos. Intel iGPUs have supported it since Tiger Lake launched at the end of 2020.
    Reply
  • rooted
    erazog said:
    The claim H.265 not being part of the computer would adversely affect the experience is incorrect in my opinion, H.264 is the defacto standard used everywhere, the H.265/HEVC variant is barely used by comparison for internet streaming video.

    Loss of H.265 support would affect some portions of the market but not a deal breaker.
    I disagree. What percentage of 4K h.264 videos do you see?

    The vast majority are encoded using VP9, h.265, or AV1.
    Reply
  • DS426
    rooted said:
    I disagree. What percentage of 4K h.264 videos do you see?

    The vast majority are encoded using VP9, h.265, or AV1.
    How many people have 4K monitors?

    I watch a lot of YouTube videos, mostly on one of my 4K TV's. On my computer, 1440p or even 1080p is fine. As @bit_user mentioned, most major web video streaming platforms either primarily rely on H.264 or are able to fallback to it. YouTube appears to rely on VP9 and AV1, not HEVC.

    This is the kind of brainwashing that consumers don't need -- MUST HAVE HEVC OR DIE!! Leave HEVC to use-cases that lean on it more heavily like video surveillance, Blu-Ray media, and some others, but I can more than live without it on any of the PC's in my house.

    BTW, now this dispute is directly hurting customers in Germany. Real nice.
    Reply
  • rooted
    DS426 said:
    How many people have 4K monitors?

    I watch a lot of YouTube videos, mostly on one of my 4K TV's. On my computer, 1440p or even 1080p is fine. As @bit_user mentioned, most major web video streaming platforms either primarily rely on H.264 or are able to fallback to it. YouTube appears to rely on VP9 and AV1, not HEVC.

    This is the kind of brainwashing that consumers don't need -- MUST HAVE HEVC OR DIE!! Leave HEVC to use-cases that lean on it more heavily like video surveillance, Blu-Ray media, and some others, but I can more than live without it on any of the PC's in my house.

    BTW, now this dispute is directly hurting customers in Germany. Real nice.
    Literally millions of people have 4K monitors.

    I didn't say I agree with any of this, just that I disagree about streaming services using h.264 when most don't. They use vp9, h.265, and av1 and yes some do use h.264 or fall back to it but certainly not most.

    They use these codecs because they offer superior compression to h.264 which saves bandwidth which in turn saves them money.
    Reply