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

[cl333r]

How about based on geolocation or country chosen they ship the codecs, not everybody lives in the US or is a proxy slave country of it. Though given how aggressive the US is by now most relevant countries probably do the same out of fear of sanctions.

[tuxd3v]

When you buy a Graphics Card, you are already buying the rights to use H.264/5, independently of the operating system!!
Its like when you buy a DVD, you are already buying the right to see it..you don't need any license, you already acquired it!

This above is truth at least for more than 7 billions people of this "small ball"..

[anarki2]

Why cant they just provide it in the repos for those who want/need it? Fedora is such a nice distro with these annoying little sprinkles all over it.

It is explained in the article.

[anarki2]

When you buy a Graphics Card, you are already buying the rights to use H.264/5, independently of the operating system!!
Its like when you buy a DVD, you are already buying the right to see it..you don't need any license, you already acquired it!

This above is truth at least for more than 7 billions people of this "small ball"..

No you don't. That's not how patents and licensing work. That's like saying if you have a driver's license you can drive any vehicle, even the ones that aren't street legal.

[tuxd3v]

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

World Wide...if you ship a Graphics Card that advertises something, it means the user is free to use the card doing exactly what the card advertises, about the licenses, I don't know, but AMD for sure pays for them, otherwise is crime.

[Space Heater]

Back to Arch in my work pc.

Yeah I'm considering moving to arch as well. It's very tiring to see changes like this (and crypto, ffmpeg, chromium etc.) decided by corporate lawyers who actively refuse to engage with the community.

The odds of distributions being sued seems to be extremely low (are there *any* historical examples?), and so this appears to be another case of lawyers having pathological tunnel vision. I'll believe that Red Hat legal's stance is sane only when other distributions start to receive legal action.

[patrick1946]

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

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.

[ssokolow]

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

Ahh, you're right. It was MPEG-2 and VC-1. I'd forgotten about that.

[NobodyXu]

How about based on geolocation or country chosen they ship the codecs, not everybody lives in the US or is a proxy slave country of it. Though given how aggressive the US is by now most relevant countries probably do the same out of fear of sanctions.

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.

[ms178]

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

Either use CachyOS or Endeavour + x86-64-v3 ALHP repo (if you have a AVX2-capable CPU). CachyOS has a broad choice of Kernels with different schedulers, optimized for low-latency gaming and comes with auto-detection for x86-64-v3 and lesser variants. I use it as my daily driver for some months now and am really happy with it. They are experimenting with newer Kernel patches that are proven to enhance the desktop/gaming experience. Endeavour is a bit more polished and closer to default Arch, which means you need to modify more to get the same experience (e.g. compiling your own more-optimized Kernel, install the x86-64-v3 repo by hand).