Mesa Can Now Be Built With Select Video Codecs Disabled For Software Patent Concerns

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Can Now Be Built With Select Video Codecs Disabled For Software Patent Concerns

A change merged to Mesa 22.2 on Thursday adds a Meson build option for being able to optionally control the video codecs supported by Mesa for its video encoding/decoding paths...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Optional-Video-Codecs

[aufkrawall]

Fine with me if there were laws that enforce availability of contents also via free codecs. But there aren't, so to hell with that (thanks to Arch maintainers for usually ignoring this corporate leech bullsh*t if they can!). Oh, and at this occasion: Screw commercial streaming sites too. Need to pay for a VPN anyway to get English language original tracks, subtitles etc...

[geearf]

Fine with me if there were laws that enforce availability of contents also via free codecs. But there aren't, so to hell with that (thanks to Arch maintainers for usually ignoring this corporate leech bullsh*t if they can!). Oh, and at this occasion: Screw commercial streaming sites too. Need to pay for a VPN anyway to get English language original tracks, subtitles etc...

While Valve/Steam did it for games, for Videos a usenet subscription is still best I think (well some Kodi plugins work pretty well, but quality isn't always great).

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I can't wait to have to grab mesa from some semi-official affiliated distro repo to get working hardware decode. And the inevitable issues when said semi-official affiliated repo gets out of sync with package updates in the official repos. This is already annoying enough with libs or out of tree drivers in RPM Fusion or Packman.

[yoshi314]

i am not a lawyer, but i do not understand why lock out something at software level that is actually implemented at hardware-level. at least this is how i understand it and i might be wrong.

if it would be a security issue - add an option to disable it at runtime maybe?

[billyswong]

I thought patent fee issue has been paid for when one purchase the hardware? Pure software decoders may be a patent concern but driver for hardware decoders look strange for anyone to apply patent charge again.

[CommunityMember]

i am not a lawyer, but i do not understand why lock out something at software level that is actually implemented at hardware-level. at least this is how i understand it and i might be wrong.

While *some* hardware manufacturers include the license for use with the hardware (most GPU vendors), not all do (especially SoC vendors), requiring the integrator/manufacturer to arrange the license if they so wish. While not quite the same, the RPi MPEG2 decoder was an example of a codec implemented at the chip level, but the RPi foundation did not license it for all shipments, letting individuals choose to pay to play (the video). As more embedded solutions uses a locked and signed bootloader and OS, locking out the use a particular hardware capability in software only for their offering can save them money because they can show they are not using, cannot use, the hardware capability.

[Nille_kungen]

I have read that it's more about encoding and decoding where encoding may be a problem but not decoding.

[SkyWarrior]

My fear is that unless your gpu vendor provides proper switches and licencing to mesa then users of opensource gpu drivers might be forced to subscribe to a paid repository of the official distro or build their own to get a frankendistro.

Nvidia users will probably be the least concerned about this stuff.

[ssokolow]

I have read that it's more about encoding and decoding where encoding may be a problem but not decoding.

That would make sense. Historically, encode licenses have tended to cost more than decode licenses as an artifact of the "many viewers, few TV stations" model.