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

[ssokolow]

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?

The patents are on H.264 itself, and someone has to pay the patent license. I think the situation is "Microsoft and Apple bundle the per-seat patent license fees into the cost of the OS, and Cisco's OpenH264 takes advantage of the cap on total fees to just write off the cost of giving everyone a free build as part of the cost of doing business for their WebRTC conferencing software, but AMD doesn't want to pay a license fee on each card sold that Microsoft and Apple are already paying. Mesa isn't distributed pre-built and, even if it was, they don't have the resources to max out the license fees, and paying patent license fees isn't the Fedora strategy."

TL;DR: The patent license structure for H.264 is fundamentally built around the final integrator paying, and you are the final integrator on a Linux machine. That's why you need to buy a keyfile to enable the GPU H.264 decoder block on a Raspberry Pi, and why the camera board has an H.264 encoding license in its price and the relevant keyfile for the GPU baked into its firmware.

Correction: It was MPEG-2 and VC-1 where they made the license optional on the earlier Pi SoCs, with the Pi4's SoC dropping hardware support for those codecs.

Back in 2015, this blog post referenced this paper, estimating that $120 of the cost of a $400 smartphone was just patent licenses, with demands typically being negoitated as a percentage share of the sale price. Really shows what a leech on society it is to allow software patenting.

[skeevy420]

Back in 2015, this blog post referenced this paper, estimating that $120 of the cost of a $400 smartphone was just patent licenses, with demands typically being negoitated as a percentage share of the sale price. Really shows what a leech on society it is to allow software patenting.

Back in the day it was upwards of $25 in patent fees per DVD player.

In 2020 I spent $140 on a new smartphone. I shudder at the thought of paying $120 in royalties, $10 in hardware, and $10 for Motorola to profit.

[holunder]

TL;DR: The patent license structure for H.264 is fundamentally built around the final integrator paying, and you are the final integrator on a Linux machine. That's why you need to buy a keyfile to enable the GPU H.264 decoder block on a Raspberry Pi, and why the camera board has an H.264 encoding license in its price and the relevant keyfile for the GPU baked into its firmware.

But the Raspi does have H.264 and H.265 HW decoding support OOTB, you are confusing this with Microsoft’s VC-1.

[angrypie]

Holy shit, it gets worse the more you look into it.

- Mentioning a patent troll by name in a git commit
- Disabling features without prior consulting with the legal team
- Disabling a feature that will severely cripple Fedora on mobile hardware after they just got into Lenovo laptops
- Causing a shitstorm for a big name in the Linux world

The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. Any of this would cause immediate termination of employment in a normal situation, but it's unlikely to happen given the name in question. The worst enemy of FOSS is, sadly, FOSS devs.

Open-source developers are unlike regular employees in a regular software house. They interact directly with the public. It's about fucking time they receive some basic PR training. GNOME devs are also guilty of this.

[bofkentucky]

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.

Juries and judges in these cases already have a tenuous grasp on the issues at play, 'they continued to do it after they knew it was against the rules' is a recipe for losing the lawsuit.

[Britoid]

I may be wrong, but given its a being disabled in the userland Mesa, if you use Flathub apps on Fedora, they use the Freedesktop Mesa builds which will still have this.

So just use the Flatpak versions

[ryao]

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.

The organization that develops those codecs is German, so I would be surprised if it was not a problem in the EU too.

[ryao]

I am continually surprised that hardware vendors can build and ship these things without being responsible for the royalties.

I imagine that the rights holders get more money by extorting downstream, since the hardware vendors would not have bothered to do this as much if they were the ones who had to pay. Such a scheme really should not be allowed.

[dragon321]

There is so much FUD and panic going on with these news. While it's deffinitely very unfortunate, it seems many people don't realize this change only affects the h264/265 family of codecs. They forget there's also vp9 and av01 which the vast majority of Youtube videos use for example and they aren't going to be affected by this change. I've seen a reddit post with a misleading title that vaapi is going to be disabled for Fedora 37, (without highlighting that this is only going to affect h264/265) so now everyone in the comments panic and say they're going to stop recommending or even using Fedora.

You're right, some news titles are misleading (suggesting that whole video acceleration will stop working) but it's still big change. Many older and still perfectly usable GPUs doesn't support VP9 or AV1 decoding and with browser extension that forces h264 sites like YT could work fine with hardware acceleration (only resolution is limited to 1080p but since Full HD resolution is still very popular then it doesn't look like significant issue). Now users of such hardware will be forced to go into software decoding using much more CPU power and reducing battery life on laptops. It's breaking of perfectly usable feature due to legal reasons. You have certain feature in hardware you bought but you can't use it without paying for additional license.

Good thing that VP9 and AV1 don't have similar licensing. But still we have a lot of usable hardware that can't use it.

[evasb]

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

No, Fedora is from Red Hat and Red Hat doesn't want to pay for patents.

The problem is that Red Hat is doing a push to preinstall Fedora in a lot of Lenovo laptops, and without these codecs Fedora will be effectively cripped. I'm sure Red Hat could do something to avoid this, Canonical did something.

It's the same openSUSE sh#t again.

PS: Looks like openSUSE is not doing what Fedora is doing WTF: https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/...SBPVSUJN4W4BN/