Microsoft charges roughly £0.99 to decode one of the most common media formats on the planet, and that is a genuinely indefensible position to be in. HEVC — also called H.265 — is what your iPhone shoots video in, what your GoPro and most drones record, what a great deal of 4K and HDR content is encoded as, and what every HEIC photo uses internally. It is everywhere. And Windows 11, running on well over a billion machines, ships without the ability to play or display any of it unless you hand Microsoft a coin.

So the obvious question — is there a free version? — has a frustrating answer: yes, there was, Microsoft buried it, and in 2026 it works just often enough to be tempting and just unreliably enough that I am going to tell most of you to pay the pound anyway. Here is the honest version of both options.

What you are actually paying for

The £0.99 is not Microsoft being greedy in the usual sense. HEVC sits on top of a patent pool, and decoding it legally means somebody pays a licensing fee to the patent holders. Microsoft has simply decided that the somebody is you.

That single fact explains every weird thing about this situation:

  • Why Mac users never see a paywall. Apple is a hardware manufacturer, so it pre-pays the HEVC licence in the cost of the device. The fee is already settled before you open the box.
  • Why VLC, PotPlayer, and the various codec packs play HEVC for free. Open-source and free players bundle their own decoders and operate in a legal grey zone the patent pool has never bothered to pursue. They are fine for playback, but they do not register HEVC with Windows itself — so they will not give you File Explorer thumbnails, working photos, or HEVC support inside Office.
  • Why there are two near-identical apps in the Store with different prices. This is the part worth understanding properly.

What actually breaks without it

It is worth being precise about what the missing codec costs you, because the failure shows up in places people do not connect to “video.” Without HEVC decoding registered in Windows, you will hit some combination of: HEVC videos refusing to play in Media Player with a “this item was encoded in a format that’s not supported” message; iPhone and Android HEVC clips that play on the phone but not the PC; HEIC photos that will not preview or show thumbnails in File Explorer; the Photos app throwing “Unable to open this file”; and images that fail to insert into Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook because Office leans on the same Windows codec layer. It is one missing component producing a dozen unrelated-looking symptoms — which is exactly why people waste hours treating each one as a separate problem.

Does your PC even qualify for the free version?

The OEM package was designed around hardware HEVC decoding, which has been standard on Intel processors since the Kaby Lake generation (7th-gen Core, 2016 onward) and on equivalent AMD and Qualcomm silicon. If your machine is from roughly 2017 or later, the hardware almost certainly supports HEVC, and the manufacturer may well have paid the licence. That is the population the free version was meant for. If you are on genuinely old hardware without hardware decode, the free OEM package is both harder to obtain and more likely to lean on software decoding that hammers your CPU — another reason the paid version, which includes software decoding properly, is the cleaner answer on older machines.

The free version Microsoft buried

There are two official Microsoft packages. The paid one is HEVC Video Extensions (around £0.99). The free one is HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer. They contain the same codec. The only difference is who is assumed to have paid the licence fee: in the OEM version, the assumption is that your PC’s manufacturer — Dell, HP, Lenovo, and so on — already paid it when they built the machine.

Because that assumption only holds for some devices, Microsoft originally listed the free version for OEMs to pre-install. Then people noticed they could install it on any PC straight from the Store, sidestepping the fee entirely. Microsoft’s response was to pull it from public Store search and download. It still exists on the Store’s back end; it is simply no longer something you can find by searching. That is the “loophole” every forum thread is talking about.

Let me be blunt about the ethics here, because the consumer-advocacy framing matters: fetching an official Microsoft package that your device may already be entitled to is not piracy, and it is not the same as the sketchy “free HEVC codec.exe” installers floating around download sites. Those third-party installers are a malware vector and you should not touch them. The OEM package is legitimate Microsoft code. The grey area is only whether your specific machine was meant to have it for free.

How to get the free version — and why it is decaying

If you want to try the free route, do it in this order:

  1. Check whether you already have it. Open Settings, go to Apps, then Installed apps, and search “HEVC”. Many OEM laptops ship with the extension pre-installed. Before paying or hunting anything down, try playing an HEVC video or opening a HEIC photo — it may already work.
  2. Use a Store package fetcher. Tools like store.rg-adguard.net let you pull the OEM package directly from Microsoft’s servers using its Store product ID. The Internet Archive also hosts copies. This is the documented method, and the files are Microsoft’s own.

Here is where my recommendation turns, though, because 2026 is not 2021. The free path has been quietly rotting:

  • The OEM version is frequently one release behind the paid one, and the gap appears to be deliberate.
  • Newer builds of Windows Media Player increasingly refuse the OEM extension, accepting only the paid package.
  • Edge dropped support for the OEM codec years ago.
  • Availability is now gated by region, device, and eligibility — the same package that installs cleanly on one machine throws an “unavailable” page on another.

In other words, the free version is being deprecated in everything but name. You can still get it to work on some hardware, but you are increasingly likely to spend twenty minutes on a workaround that a newer Windows update will quietly break next quarter.

The image angle most guides miss

This is a video-codec article that belongs in an image troubleshooting library, and that is not an accident. HEIC photos — the default format on every modern iPhone — store their actual image data using HEVC compression. To open one natively in Windows you need two extensions, not one: the free HEIF Image Extensions handles the container, and HEVC decoding handles the pixels inside it.

This trips people up constantly. They install the free HEIF Image Extensions, expect their iPhone photos to open, and still get “Unable to open this file” — because the HEVC half is missing. The HEIF package alone is genuinely not enough for most HEIC files. If your problem is specifically iPhone photos failing in the Photos app, the focused fix lives in our guide to the Windows Photos app refusing to open HEIC, and the full format picture is in the complete HEIC on Windows 11 guide. If the failure is happening when you try to drop those photos into a document, see HEIC images in Word, where the same codec dependency is the root cause.

The neat contrast worth noting: AVIF, the newer format, uses the royalty-free AV1 codec, so its Windows extension is free and stays free. HEIC is shackled to HEVC’s patent pool. Same family of formats, completely different cost story — purely because of the codec underneath.

The honest recommendation

If you are technical, on hardware that qualifies, and you only need occasional HEVC playback, the free OEM extension is a reasonable thing to try first — check for a pre-installed copy before anything else. There is no shame in not paying a fee your laptop maker may already have covered.

For everyone else — and that is most readers — pay the £0.99. I do not enjoy writing that, because the paywall is a small daily insult on a format this universal. But the maths is simple. The free version is unreliable today and getting worse, the time you will spend chasing it is worth more than a pound, and the paid package is the only route Microsoft is actually maintaining. Buy it once, tie it to the Microsoft account you will keep, and the problem is solved across Photos, File Explorer, Office, and Media Player permanently. (One genuine annoyance to know about: a clean Windows reinstall sometimes loses the purchase association, so keep your order confirmation.)

Pay the pound, decode everything, and stop thinking about it. That is the unsatisfying but correct answer — and if it makes the pill easier to swallow, remember that it is a one-time charge that unlocks every HEVC video and every HEIC photo you will ever touch on that machine, not a subscription. For a format this entrenched, that is the rare Microsoft purchase that genuinely earns its keep.

Pricing and availability verified May 2026; the £0.99 figure varies slightly by region and the free OEM package’s availability changes over time. Reviewed quarterly.