Fedora Will Land A Free Software But "Crippled" AAC Decoder

[kaprikawn]

a lot of people are leaving Fedora an using Arch Linux. the way i see it Fedora is going downhill, they dont care about there Users. but why bother shipping a Crippled Codec? if its Crippled who in the hell is gonna use it to begin with

Having recently done installs of both Fedora and Arch I very much doubt that's true. To migrate from Fedora to Arch, you have to know how to install Arch. Whereas installing Fedora is somewhat similar to most other fixed release distros i.e. it's really easy. Installing Arch is only surpassed in difficulty with Gentoo and LFS.

[DanL]

This aac reminds me on about 2 decade old things...

Yeah, no one uses AAC anymore.

You can't make something accessible for an international audience legal or illegal, as laws differ in every country.

Actually, you can. If you know any laws Fedora is breaking, please tell us/them.

[Anvil]

Having recently done installs of both Fedora and Arch I very much doubt that's true. To migrate from Fedora to Arch, you have to know how to install Arch. Whereas installing Fedora is somewhat similar to most other fixed release distros i.e. it's really easy. Installing Arch is only surpassed in difficulty with Gentoo and LFS.

iv'e known some that have Ditched Fedora an gone over to Arch . Problem with Fedora IMO they make dumb retarded decisions, . for example that last Fiasco with Anaconda, they need to learn from Debian there which they fail at doing.

[Brisse]

This should be enough to handle AAC in video files produced by consumer grade video cameras

Most of such devices will encode LC-AAC so they will play perfectly through this "crippled" decoder with disabled SBR because there's no SBR in LC-AAC to begin with.

Yeah, no one uses AAC anymore.

LC-AAC is very common, but is not affected by this. Only the much less common HE-AAC is affected. HE-AAC will simply sound a little more dull on Fedora (unless the program comes with it's own decoder rather than relying on system libraries) and you might not hear high frequencies such as cymbals, but HE-AAC should not be used for music to begin with because it cannot achieve transparency so I don't see why it's a big deal.

Opus is a free codec with similar performance to HE-AAC for low to mid bitrate audio. It has spectral folding which achieves the same thing as spectral band replication, but it's not restricted by patents or licenses, so it's not like there aren't any good free alternatives.

[DanL]

LC-AAC is very common, but is not affected by this.

I know. I was being sarcastic.

[MartinK]

for example that last Fiasco with Anaconda, they need to learn from Debian there which they fail at doing.

What Anaconda fiasco ? I certainly don't know about any.

[starshipeleven]

You can't make something accessible for an international audience legal or illegal, as laws differ in every country.

Yeah you can, if it is compliant for the stricter copyright laws it will be compliant for laxer ones too.

[BaronHK]

1. Hardly anyone ever used AAC. Unless you have some tracks from iTunes, you probably don't have any AAC files, and iTunes has never used High Efficiency AAC with Spectral Band Replication AFAIK, which is only really useful at extremely low bitrates and even then, it has limited hardware support, so even audiobooks tend to come in MP3.

2. There aren't any Free Software AAC encoders that provide good results. The LAME MP3 encoder beats FAAC hands down and can go toe to toe with the iTunes and Nero AAC encoders at the bitrates that people actually tend to use. Nero isn't updated anymore and probably never will be, and iTunes has never had a GNU/Linux version. It may run on Wine, but why would you?

3. Fedora can provide full MP3 support because the patents have fully expired. Why wouldn't you use that?

4. The majority of hardware players and Android support Ogg Vorbis and Android and some hardware players support Opus. If you're looking for a modern codec that doesn't have a nasty patent thicket and limited Free Software support, you'd be using these anyway.

5. Would you like NOTHING instead? Fedora's "fdk-aac" will be fine for people who have to use AAC for legacy reasons, because they used iTunes at some point in the past.

[Anvil]

What Anaconda fiasco ? I certainly don't know about any.

back during Fedora 18 cycle it was , google it

[arbition]

back during Fedora 18 cycle it was , google it

Your post is the second result already. That suggests that it wasn't a particularly popular and thus not a particularly major issue. There's even an unrelated ubuntu article in the middle of the first page. Perhaps you might explain to us in detail. All I can see is that it was new, and had a few bugs. It's not for me to apologise on behalf of the fedora team for trying to move forward and be on the cutting edge.