Removing HEVC support wasn't their choice but probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices [1].

Windows media player probably sees very little usage nowadays and probably even less for HEVC, when most content playback happens via streaming and browsers today.

As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-a...

'It's worse for our users, but easier for our developers' is an unacceptable tradeoff, they deserve the backlash.

If Google and Apple also decided to remove support for common video formats instead of just paying the slightly higher licensing fee, I might have some sympathy.

Microsoft thinks they have all the money in the world when it comes to wasting huge sums on mergers and acquisitions that go nowhere. Spend some on maintaining the user experience.

Also, with Dell and others releasing new Windows laptops with 8 Gigs of RAM, needless memory bloat is unacceptable.

At this point they could direct some AI to vibe rewrite every UI code in Win32 and MFC and it'd still be vastly better than crap they push us.

Wouldn't HEVC licences already be paid by the hardware/gpu vendors on most devices? And Microsoft just exposes api for that hardware?

Is this just for a purely software implementation of it?

>As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs

Can someone explain to me why these multi operating system app building tools don’t compile down to native code and leverage native APIs? Is there nothing like that available?

The HEVC support is free is you know the "secret" link:

ms-windows-store://pdp?productId=9N4WGH0Z6VHQ

It's a wide know workaround, been there for years, obviously Microsoft pretends they don't know about it.

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

It must be possible these days to allow designers to prototype UIs in WebTech and then convert it to native code.

> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps

I mean, I agree, but Microsoft of all companies really should be invested in building Windows native applications. If they can't be fucked to build Windows-native applications, why would anyone else?

Microsoft should be setting the example, and the high bar of what Windows-native quality software should be. It's frankly embarrassing for them that they can't or won't do it.

> The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily

Ah yes, we don't want Microsoft to run out of JavaScript developers to keep improving their desktop operating system in this manner. More webdevs, that's what's going to fix what ails Windows!

HEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.

Windows 11 is not free software. Apple macOS, iOS, ipadOS all support HEVC and Dolby because Apple pays licensing costs, likewise Microsoft should do the same for Windows users, it is not free OS.