Fedora Can Now Ship MPEG2 Support, But What They Will Ship Is Yet To Be Figured Out

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Can Now Ship MPEG2 Support, But What They Will Ship Is Yet To Be Figured Out

With the last of the MPEG-2 patents having expired last February, the Fedora / Red Hat legal team is ready to okay the shipping of MPEG-2 video support out-of-the-box in Fedora Linux at long last... But they don't yet know what implementation to use...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-MPEG2-What-To-Ship

[hajj_3]

DTS audio patents may potentially have expired recently, red hat legal team should look into that: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175103

[sdack]

So after all this time did they not once bother to think about what to do when the patents run out. That's not exactly smart.

[edwaleni]

How did the Raspberry Pi Foundation do it?

They only charge you for the hardware decoding license.

Did they scrape it from VLC?

[bash2bash]

In all honesty, I personally don't really care about mpeg2 and I think most people don't.

Lets be honest, for the past decade or so, everyone installs an extra player to be able to have viable desktop experience. Like VLC, MPV, ffmpeg or even the extra gstreamer plugins.

its like... adding USB 1 support when everyone is running at USB 3.

[wswartzendruber]

Here, after all this time, Linux can now ship DVD players out of the box.

[LinAGKar]

Here, after all this time, Linux can now ship DVD players out of the box.

Except for the DRM.

[caligula]

Here, after all this time, Linux can now ship DVD players out of the box.

The problem with DVDs is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System, not patents.

[phoenk]

In all honesty, I personally don't really care about mpeg2 and I think most people don't.

Lets be honest, for the past decade or so, everyone installs an extra player to be able to have viable desktop experience. Like VLC, MPV, ffmpeg or even the extra gstreamer plugins.

its like... adding USB 1 support when everyone is running at USB 3.

No, it is nothing like that at all. USB is backwards compatible, so USB-1 cards would be useless if you already have a 2 or 3 card. MPEG-2 is a video codec which is widely used, most notably by DVDs. While there are newer and objectively better video codecs which have been created in the time since, you can't just use a VP9 decoder to decode MPEG-2. In order to decode MPEG-2, you need an MPEG-2 decoder. And no, MPEG-3 and MPEG-4 are not backwards compatible.

[bash2bash]

I understand the technical aspect, but I'm talking about the practicality. Maybe my silly comparison to USB1/USB3 wasn't very effective.

In other words, you said it yourself... DVD. The world has moved on from DVD, we reached Blueray and we moved on from there as well, both rather dead technologies to the Western world. Now everything is streamed or comes in some kind of Matroska container & the AV1 codec.

More importantly, who actually uses mpeg2 these days?

No, it is nothing like that at all. USB is backwards compatible, so USB-1 cards would be useless if you already have a 2 or 3 card. MPEG-2 is a video codec which is widely used, most notably by DVDs. While there are newer and objectively better video codecs which have been created in the time since, you can't just use a VP9 decoder to decode MPEG-2. In order to decode MPEG-2, you need an MPEG-2 decoder. And no, MPEG-3 and MPEG-4 are not backwards compatible.