Fedora Broke H264 GPU Acceleration For 'Legal Reasons'

This Fedora video codec situation is a complete mess, Fedora removed h264, h265 and vc1 support from their mesa build basically breaking GPU acceleration for these codecs on AMD based systems and I hope that it doesn't have a knock on effect in other distros.

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#Fedora #Linux #OpenSuse #OpenSource #FOSS #patent

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[slitairek]

I remember the good old days where anything "licence iffy" was just dumped in to a "non-free" repo and you were told to "install it yourself!" Which is basically what they've done here but stubbing their toe on every table leg in between!

[OcteractSG]

Thanks for covering this. I saw Matt’s (The Linux Cast’s) video and was not entirely sure what was going on. Your explanation was more complete and easier to follow.

[SGCSmith]

H.264/H.265/HEVC has been a nightmare everywhere due to the royalty payments and licensing. It's why Google and other companies are trying to push VP8, VP9, AV1, etc, which can be distributed worry free in free software, implemented in hardware for free, etc. The same extends to JPEG imagery, which is why WebP is becoming more prevalent.

I'll be great to see the open source community come together and put MPEG in their place.

[PhilKulak]

To be clear, this isn't going out until the _next_ version of Fedora, so it may very well be in RPM Fusion by then.

[xKB]

I remember back in the day, Linux magazines would come with a cd-rom of whichever distro they were highlighting that issue. Same disc, two different installers. One for USA and Japan, the other was worldwide. The difference was the “restricted extras” would be installed by default on the WW installer, but not the US and Japan one. It would be a checkbox to click or not during install.
Also, it didn’t matter where you were in the world, if you used the WW installer in The US, it worked just fine.

[CMDRSweeper]

You matter because you are a "loudmouth" or "influencer" or "Internet Celebrity" or "Known person" in the FOSS space due to your career of making videos like this.
And it doesn't matter if you file your clothes by the door in the background or /dev/null on your Linux box, you are one that it matters to listen to and talk to for them.

[RadikAlice]

Kinda sucks, but not their fault. Software patents are stupid, but even more so in Burgerland

[elmariachi]

Debian finally includes firmwares and Fedora drops codecs. Linux is like an universe, equalling itself out xD

[socvirnylestela]

openSUSE does not ship H264 by default because legal reasons. you need to add the third-party Packman repo to add the proprietary codecs

[ItsCryptic]

Heya I’m ItsCryptic1 and brought your tweets to his (Matthew Miller) attention as I felt you have a much broader audience than myself and people will actually see his reply to your tweet :)

[ivolol]

h264 is still EVERYWHERE. To say it has gone by the wayside by now is a big misnomer. We won't see it decline until AV1 really upticks in usage when hardware AV1 decoding starts filter out the masses (basically coming with currently released products, e.g all new GPUs for the end of this year by NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, "smart TVs" will probably follow suit soonish).

On the FPM-Fusion front, they'd have to be a separate legal company from RedHat

[PinakiGuptaAppu]

“The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It’s up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.”

— Linus Torvalds

[zackyd]

Weird how far we have gotten away from the days of doing things like libdvdcss where it was straight piracy

[anon_y_mousse]

As a long time Linux user, I remember the days of having to install mp3 codecs on pretty much every distro, and back then Windows required separate installation of a bunch of video codecs too, so while it was kind of annoying, it was still less frustrating for me than Windows. When I first started using Linux I had a soft modem and it required special drivers that worked perfectly on Red Hat and actually gave me twice the speed compared to Windows. Hopefully, someone thinking of switching to Linux from Windows reads this and understands that computers suck, software sucks, all of it, but Linux sucks less than Windows and if you put in the time and effort to cope with Windows, why not put in the same time to cope with Linux and wind up with a better experience in the end and free yourself from the tyranny of Microsoft.

[stephenreaves]

I remember Fedora had this problem when I first got started with them (F25?). I thought they fixed this by using Cisco's OpenH264 codec? That wasn't enabled by default, then it was in later versions. Is this just reverting that to be non-default or is this happening in a different layer of the licensing stack?

[ChrispyNut]

Oh how history loves to repeat itself. Had this previously with audio codecs back in the day when CD-ROMs were common. Heck, "non-free codecs" have been a thing throughout, I guess things have been quiet on this front long enough that many have forgotten or never learned what it all means.

[StaceyAyodele]

I'm just enjoying my Ubuntu MATE gaming laptop and hearing all the different news.
I smile at the fact that I never have to touch Windows 10/11 ever again.

[pastenml]

The most upsetting whiteboard message so far :D

[Christopher-ynsk]

Now I'm convinced, You know what You're talking about. You have the best, or one of the best linux news channells I know of.
Thank You for Your work.

[lazyhrse]

This decision could be good or bad, depending on their documentation and user friendliness. Now what I really hate about these changes, is that they assume you already know what you have to do. This is a prevalent problem with Linux in general, lack of documentation and support. Making breaking changes without letting the user know.