Lenovo laptops silently stripped of important feature in BIOS updates

Various users of Lenovo's Legion laptops have been complaining about a missing feature on their laptops on Lenovo's forums since April of 2021. This missing feature is the H.264 encoding codec, an encoder that the NVIDIA graphics card in these laptops use for Shadowplay. This codec is also used for hardware-accelerated video encoding in software that supports NVENC, some of which isn't strictly for content creation.

The lack of this encoder causes numerous issues on user's devices, such as Shadowplay crashing, OBS failing to record/stream, and even the Oculus Quest 2 failing to stream video from the laptop to the headset over USB. This also makes many major use cases for high-power gaming hardware (streaming, video editing, or just recording your screen) difficult to do on these laptops.

Lenovo's exclusion of this feature is not noted anywhere visible for customers to see before purchasing, let alone in the BIOS updates provided to users of machines originally sold with this encoder enabled. Reverting to a BIOS version from 2020 has fixed the problem for some users, although BIOS updates from 2020 don't exist for Lenovo's latest Legion laptops.

The issue only seems to affect Lenovo gaming laptops sold in Germany, potentially due to a legal battle between Nokia and Lenovo that had been ongoing for some time. However, this suit seems to have been settled now, so it's not clear why Lenovo has continued to exclude these codecs from customer's notebooks.

As of now, it's unclear if the encoder is missing from Lenovo's other laptops with NVIDIA graphics, such as models from their ThinkPad P series or the X1 Extreme. The codec has been confirmed missing from devices as old as the Y540 from 2019, although older devices with recent BIOS updates may be affected.

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