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

[V1tol]

I can understand disabling H264 in FFMPEG for example - there is a software implementation. But why you should disable it in Mesa which just passes encoded frame to GPU and receives decoded one - all decoding happens on GPU? What part of implementation is patented there?

[Mershl]

One reason more to stay away from Fedora for desktop use. If bad gaming performance wasn't enough already, these annoying and desktop-usage unfriendly decisions is not something I would support.

Just out of interest. Which distributions would you recommend for good gaming performance compared to Fedora?

[Calinou]

I guess this is another scenario where Nobara will do what Fedoradon't

[Sonadow]

So the people who use Linux and brag about Linux users being more savvy and technologically superior to Windows and macOS users don't even know how to build Mesa for themselves with these features enabled.

[patrick1946]

I guess this is another scenario where Nobara will do what Fedoradon't

Are they usable in a toolbox too? I use Silverblue, so the Codec thing is not affecting me much but it would be nice to have a toolbox who is supporting them out of the box.

[user1]

Now people understand why I always disagreed with the "Fedora is the new Ubuntu" bandwagon. Fedora stands for software and content freedom, and these codecs are patented which means Fedora cannot ship them out of the box. Blame software patents, not the distribution.

Unfortunately, RPM Fusion probably won't provide Mesa with decoding support for H.264/5 and VC1 soon - no one is really interested in packaging it. Someone will probably step up, but don't hold your breath. https://github.com/rpmfusion-infra/fedy/issues/110

While I too think that it's wrong to call Fedora "the new Ubuntu", it's not like Ubuntu even has vaapi enabled by default for any browser, unlike Fedora, which has it enabled by default for Firefox.

[user1]

One reason more to stay away from Fedora for desktop use. If bad gaming performance wasn't enough already, these annoying and desktop-usage unfriendly decisions is not something I would support.

Whenever someone says he gets worse gaming performance on X distro, I just refuse to believe it. It always turns out to be something wrong on his end or something that has to do with the window manager affecting the game. I tried many distros from pretty much every family (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Manjaro) and got virtually identical gaming performance on all of them.

[justinkb]

Just revert https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/m...f373fe49806b52 and rebuild. Easy peasy

[skeevy420]

I can understand disabling H264 in FFMPEG for example - there is a software implementation. But why you should disable it in Mesa which just passes encoded frame to GPU and receives decoded one - all decoding happens on GPU? What part of implementation is patented there?

I thought about looking but it's a very fucking long list of patents by a lot of companies.

[juxuanu]

Back to Arch in my work pc.