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

[Anvil]

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.

obviously you didnt do it at all, im pretty sure Michael has some stories about it on his website

[MartinK]

But how are issues Anaconda had in Fedora 18 really relevant to this discussion today (adding initial support for a previously encumbered media codec) ?

BTW, what happened in F18 with Anaconda was indeed a major change, because:
- the GUI was migrated from GTK2 to GTK3
- new text UI was created which works much better on serial and other limited functionality consoles while (IMHO) looking much better than the previous NEWT based one
- the previous single-thredded model was changed to multi threaded model to prevent UI freezing
- the UI (both GUI and TUI) was switched to the hub-and-spoke model, so that users don't have to click through *every damn screen* & go back all the time if they miss something or want to change their decision

All of this was direly needed, both due to grave usability issues but also for future proofing - same reason why Anaconda was ported to Python 3 back in the F23/24 timeframe.

As you can see, this was a rather big undertaking - just try to start the CentoOS 6 installation, which has the old pre-F18 Anaconda and compare it with recent Fedora or CentOS 7.

The transition in F18 was indeed not ideal, but the issues have been fixed, missing functionality has been added back and IMHO Anaconda is now one of the best (if not the best!) OS installers overall.

[TheBlackCat]

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

There are international treaties that limit how different they can be.

[kurkosdr]

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.

LC-AAC is the format used practically in all m4a files on the internet (including the ones from iTunes) and the format used for sound in practically all mp4 files with H.264 video. The last use case alone is a major driver for LC-AAC use: you need an LC-AAC codec to play mp4 files with H.264 video.

BTW thanks to OpenH264, Fedora can now play mp4 files with H.264 video and LC-AAC audio (which is most FullHD-and-lower mp4 files out there), despite H.264 not being royalty-free yet. It can also play FullHD free-to-air broadcasts which use H.264 video (aka most FullHD free-to-air broadcasts out there), because most of them use either MPEG Layer II, LC-AAC or AC3 for audio, and Fedora supports those three audio formats (with the exception of France and Austria which use E-AC3 audio, which Fedora doesn't support yet).

Yes I know I am 5 years late to the party, but wanted this to go on record. Fedora is very good at showing us which codecs are royalty-free in the US, and wanted to outline what became royalty-free with the inclusion of LC-AAC in practical terms.

PS: HE-AAC is used in DAB+ radio and pretty much nothing else, so it's not an essential codec for an OS to have.