Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns

[finalzone]

Based on Germany and easy to recompile. Much safer bet. rpm packages are a mess to maintain.

Last sentence is unecessary as the topic is about legal matter that Fedora had to abid. Nothing to do with packaging format.

[juxuanu]

Last sentence is unecessary as the topic is about legal matter that Fedora had to abid. Nothing to do with packaging format.

The article mentions the probable need to compile your own mesa if you are to retain the mentioned features. The ability to do so easily is very on topic.

[tuxd3v]

This is ridiculous. If such claims were viable, then patent trolls would have already tried to extort money out of a lot of distros (and projects like VLC, mpv and ffmpeg) which have been shipping these codecs for a good while now.

When you are seeing a graphics card accelerated video, the graphics card is the one doing all the work.So you don't need software codecs.

patents could apply when you are building codecs as software like the CPU based not accelerated encoder for H264 called x264, there could maybe be some claims, if your code is the same as the patent states..ofcourse no one will build a free codec using patented code, people that build them...have to workaround carefully.

In any case those types of patents only apply in the US,
In the EU, when you buy a movie, a song, and so on, you buy automatically the right to see/use it, and its like that for more than 7 billion people on earth..and its not something new, its like that from the beginning..

When you are encoding some H264 video using hardware accelerated methods, the encoding is done on the Graphics card( The vendor already payed for the Hardware blocs.. and later you brought the card, so you own the right to use it!), in the hardware...so codec patents also don't apply.They can maybe apply only to software(things that you run on the CPU) on the US.

[rmnscnce]

Maybe they should provide repositories outside of the US? So far I understand this is an US problem. If I understand it right flatpak should be ok if they use the freedesktop runtime.

They can't. If the community wants to, a detached unofficial repository can be set up outside of the US to accommodate it, but there must be no official ties to the Fedora Project as it will be a legal liability for Red Hat.

What an odd positionment. Can't they just ignore the problem and wait for someone to actually sue them? It's not as if they're declaring that there is an actual threat, just the possibility of a threat. If we're going there, might as well pass the legal comb on everything and anything you ever do as a company/individual just in case...sounds like a mad policy to me.

That's probably what's actually happening. Someone representing one of the patent pools have probably sent a cease-and-desist letter to Red Hat regarding the codec situation. In the mailing list thread it was mentioned that "giving further explanations" is a legal suicide so I think that's what's happening.

[vaparetia]

Will this move affect flatpak user? If yes, which app will be affected?

Unless the flatpak Freedesktop Platform that ALL flatpaks use makes this change as well, you shouldn't be affected. To test this, you can use the flathub version of Firefox vs the native RPM build and see any difference on that.

Take that with a grain of salt as I'm not an expert, but seems to me what everyone has said, flatpaks will be unaffected.

[Guest]

And I refuse to get into an argument with people that refuse to accept facts, like benchmark numbers, admitting that their favorite distro needs much more hand-tuning to get it to acceptable performance levels (you can gain a lot by compiling your own Xanmod-Kernel even on Fedora). And yes, I have provided numbers in similar conversations because I actually tried them all and yes, Fedora lost out by a large margin, providing a terrible out-of-the-box experience for gamers (which was even worse than the other distros you quoted which were still not that great). No, it wasn't user error, I know what I am doing.

"Terrible" is either a far exaggeration, or is limited to whatever specific testing you claim to have done.

What specific games have you tried? I've tried retail and classic WoW, Dota 2, Diablo II Res, AoE2 DE, Beat Saber, Guild Wars 2, and some other games I can't quite think of right now, and they performed the same between F36 and Ubuntu 22.04 as of about 2 weeks ago. Various testing between Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE TW over the past year or so also showed no real difference.

I game at 4K@60Hz on Fedora 36 no problem today with comparable FPS to Windows. I generally know what I'm doing too

[chrisr]

The article mentions the probable need to compile your own mesa if you are to retain the mentioned features. The ability to do so easily is very on topic.

It seems that - for

/usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so

at least - you can successfully drop the video driver from Mesa 22.3.0-devel into an installation of Mesa 22.1.7.

Edit: Actually, maybe not. I was basing that assessment just on running vainfo

[ryao]

Frauenhofer is German but the patent law is EU law. And it says that software is not patentable but there are rulings that software as part of a technical solution is patentable. I am not a lawyer and it is complicated because the rulings are by different courts and are not very consistent. But AFAIK so long as you are only distribute software it is fine but if you build a machine with it they can catch you. So they could come after you if you build your own computer but I think it is really really unlikely.

With ”fixed function hardware”, these things are no longer software, so the good sense that software is not patentable no longer applies.

[CommunityMember]

When you are encoding some H264 video using hardware accelerated methods, the encoding is done on the Graphics card( The vendor already payed for the Hardware blocs.. and later you brought the card, so you own the right to use it!),

As has been stated more than a few times by people with access to competent legal advice, that is not the way AMD licenses the IP for their GPU core which are then assembled by partners into shipping cards who would be responsible for paying the fees (it is unclear if they license their iGPUs differently; rumor is Intel does include the license for their iGPUs as they are the final assembly, but I do not know if that rumor is true (brings up the interesting question though whether discrete ARC GPUs will have the IP licensed)).

[ryao]

That has nothing to do with US.
When something is patented, then any use of it without obtaining permission or paying for royalties is crime.
Yes, anywhere you go it is a crime, because you did not design that stuff, others take their time to do so you have to pay for it.

Intellectual property theft is not a criminal matter. It is a civil matter.