More Linux Distros Break H264 GPU Acceleration

After Fedora and OpenSuse decided to break there MESA packages I thought we were done talking about this whole patent encumbered codec situation with h264, h265 and vc1, oh how wrong I was. Steam OS 3 and Manjaro are back to make me worried once again

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#Linux #steamdeck #Fedora #OpenSuse #manjaro #mesa

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[BrodieRobertson]

I made a slight mistake on the Steam Deck section, I missed a comment from a Valve employee saying that "a conscience decision needs to be made to enable these hardware codecs and this will need to go through some kind of legal review before it can be re-enabled." However, I'm still making the incompetence argument just in a slightly different way, they waited until the broken feature shipped out to the users before bothering to update the PKGBUILD to include the codecs, I really doubt they suddenly held a meeting after the update already hit stable (if they did someone needs to hire an assistant), so someone still forgot to update the PKGBUILD. This is even funnier than my original guess.

[altermetax]

Of course Manjaro had to be in something like this somehow

[awolsam]

The h264 patents should be expiring in the next few years, so perhaps then the codec insanity will stop.. h265 would still be problematic though, but luckily it is not used much and things are moving towards AV1 instead.

[dylon]

manjaro disabling the codecs was super annoying and was what finally pushed me off of using it. i had literally just done a fresh install of manjaro on the unstable repos (so no delay from arch packages), painstakingly set it all up the way i wanted it, just to immediately find out that manjaro disabled the codecs as soon as i tried exporting something in kdenlive. there was no way for me to tell because this was a whole couple weeks before the removal hit the stable branch (where they announced it on the forums and everyone took notice). i think i was the first person to say anything about this on the manjaro subreddit, and the only answers i got were "build mesa yourself" and "switch to another distro". so i did. hello endeavour, goodbye manjaro

[LeonWhite]

The amount of time I have had to expend thinking about this issue is maddening. There are so many hoops to jump through to get hardware codecs working on Linux, and every different hardware config requires slightly different steps to get it working. Working codecs are so critical to battery life, distros need to be getting it right out of the box. Hopefully av1 is truly unencumbered and this will all be history soon.

[joe.nassimian]

It's been ok so far because CISCO was footing the licensing bill. There was a certain uncertainty whether cisco would continue to pay for everybody's use of the codecs specially after h265 was released which might explain why certain entities decided to play it safe, specially the small ones that do not want to end up on the other side of a legal battle.

[leggettc]

I can definitely understand the concern. IANAL, but I think legally it could be argued that before the blame would have fallen to mesa for distributing those codecs, while now that they are opt-in, the blame would fall to the distro maintainers. That's probably the logic that these distros' legal terms are employing when deciding what the safe move is.

[HroiG]

That blog post at 9:17 seems a lot more questionable to me than you talk about in the video. First of all they mixed up copyright and patent laws, sure, that can be a mistake. But then they go on to talk about how the European laws are very strict on this, but the EU doesn't recognize software as patentable, they are not enforceable in the EU, this is for example how VLC gets around software patents and they talk about this in their legal overview on their website.

[cameronbosch]

Manjaro is literally on life support right now. This and its SSL issues might have just killed it.

[drishalballaney]

I have a feeling that somehow, somewhere mesa might have gotten a secret notice or something which prompted them to avoid the patent issues altogether

[josephdegarmo]

Imagine what would happen if these codecs are removed from the Ubuntu repositories. Users of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, KDE Neon, etc. would go ape$#!t over this and the Linux world will be thrown into total chaos.

[kuhluhOG]

15:00 Well, the reason why it's a problem now (at least from how it was explained to me), is because people now KNOW that it could be a problem.
Beforehand you (as a distro) could have said that they didn't know that this could be a problem when they get a letter by a patent holder (yes, this can protect you even in front of a court to some extent, not fully, but to some extent).
But know they know about this issue and as such this excuse doesn't work anymore.

[tireseas]

Seems me and Manjaro finally have something in common. We both have no idea what they're doing.

[flame.sniper]

Another step to make Linux user-friendly!
Congratulations to all developers involved in their mission to destroy the linux desktop.

[xXUnrulyXx]

endeavourOS has been the best arch based distro i've run so far. from the way they handled the GRUB issue to this issue here.. glad i picked it to stick with over a year ago now..

[Efaill]

And everyday I'm happy that I moved to Vanilla Arch from Manjaro.

[slan]

All this talk makes me more and more glad that I use Gentoo. I build packages in my system and I choose what those packages support.

[MrDran]

I think they are worried now because previously they could claim ignorance, whereas now they may not be able to do that since they had to manually add the flag. Knowingly infringing patents is much worse

[Bg]

I thought when h264 was coming up that the company assured us that h264 was free to use for decoding, but not for the encoding part..

[michaelrynn]

Paying for patents on video codecs is too much like Ransomware.