On some Win 10 systems, HEVC video playback may stop working. The reason for this is that Windows 10 does not include an HEVC decoder.

If you are experiencing issues with HEVC, you can download and install the HEVC codec for free from the Microsoft Store. This codec supports hardware-accelerated HEVC playback on the latest graphics units and graphics chips.

HEVC videos can be decoded by the integrated graphics units on the Skylake (Core i-6000, 8 bit only), Kaby Lake (Core i-7000), Kaby Lake Refresh und Coffee Lake (Core i-8000) processors from Intel, as well as the GPUs on the AMD Radeon RX 400, Radeon RX 500 and Radeon RX Vega 56/64 graphics cards and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 series graphics cards (Pascal) and the Nivida GeForce GTX 960 and GeForce GTX 950.

Go to HEVC codec download

On some systems, the HEVC decoder is actually already installed. This update integrates an HEVC codec into the system by means of the file fcumediaextensionupdate_x64.cab, which makes it both unnecessary and impossible to install the HEVC Video Extension from the Store. However, if you perform a fresh install of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update 1709, you will need to download and install the HEVC Video Extension. In our own tests of the extension, HEVC playback also worked on a Core i3-7100U in the NUC7I3BNK, as well as on a Celeron N3450.