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

[hashrack456]

What happens if you decide to use NVIDIA hardware instead. I guess I will stick with my gtx1060 a little longer on fedora.

You don't have to worry about nvidia. nvidia doesn't have this problem. It will work just fine as long as you have proprietary driver and cuda installed properly. This is amd only problem. Intel has it's own separate media driver. It may cause problem on older cpu like haswell and prior.

[NobodyXu]

So US law is now universal? Actually if you think ownership over ideas is a good concept you should think about that the USA would be in debt to rest of the world for eternity. 😎

Especially to the middle east where concepts like writing or the alphabet were invented. I hope you already paid them. 😉

An encoding format contains more than just an idea or a concept, it requires the engineers and a few professionals to actually design a format by putting many drafts, and try to put up a reference implementation.

[cooperate]

Can’t they pay royalties to obtain legal rights for h264 and h265 codecs?

[hashrack456]

Can’t they pay royalties to obtain legal rights for h264 and h265 codecs?

Redhat or IBM can. But don't want to I guess.

[skeevy420]

Can’t they pay royalties to obtain legal rights for h264 and h265 codecs?

You probably already have.

If you own a modern smartphone or smart TV, a Blu-Ray player, a PS4-era console or better, and other such products you've already paid for it which means that, ultimately, one of the biggest problems is that we've paid for various licenses many times over and they still want us to pay for them again and again and again.

I don't want to give them any ideas, but it'd be easier if they just sold USB royalty dongles.

That's why none of us feel that bad about using "illegal" software in such a manner. I know damn well that I've paid for the rights many times over and it isn't my fault that they didn't design a way to actually manage digital rights with their Digital Rights Management schemes.

[leigh123linux]

The potential fix just landed on https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/...uildID=2068556. It turned out splitting mesa vaapi is a viable suggestion. As I write, Fedora mesa maintainer proposed it to one of RPM Fusion contributors. See the spec file on https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa/tree/rawhide

Are you going to do it?
Don't expect the existing RPM Fusion contributors to do it as it requires hardware to test it.
We have enough abandoned/orphaned packages to take care of as it is.

Someone will need to do it, see https://rpmfusion.org/Contributors

[ms178]

"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

I've done my testing with Company of Heroes 2, with the in-game-benchmark, in 1440p, and got around 20 fps with Fedora Rawhide, around 85 fps on the same Fedora with a custom-compiled and configured Xanmod-Kernel and I got 101 fps with my hand-tuned CachyOS and EndeavourOS installations (which involves also many other custom-compiled packages). For reference, I get around 92 fps on Windows 11. If you are interested in the details of that journey, I made a blog series about this which you can read here: https://seylaw.blogspot.com/search/label/Tweaks - I also maintain a repo with my personal packages for Arch Linux, if anyone is interested in my optimizations to certain packages: https://github.com/ms178/archpkgbuilds

[tuxd3v]

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)).

If AMD is indeed having hardware block IPs in its hardware( I own several products, and I can say it DOES! ), and have paid for them,so any person that buy those cards can use them..
There are no such a thing as AMD does things differently...or they pay for the hardware blocks, or they haven't paid...its a transaction!
It doesn't matter is the vendor is some other company, what matters is does the chips have h265/5 blocks...yes or no?
If they have, someone had paid for them obviously..it doesn't matter who.

The only situation that can be bad for AMD is if they are indeed using IP blocks, without paying for them, and that is a crime.The vendor doesn't matter, the vendor comes later in the process...what matters is if the chip creators have paid for the IP blocks or not.

[finalzone]

Are you going to do it?

Yes, I have these hardware notably Ryzen 5825U and Radeon RX 6950 XT. Only stuff to learn is to get familiar to mesa spec.

[leigh123linux]

Yes, I have these hardware notably Ryzen 5825U and Radeon RX 6950 XT. Only stuff to learn is to get familiar to mesa spec.

I was thinking about the issue.

Basically you need to enable h264 & h265 and delete all the existing sub-packages.
Create a single sub-package called mesa-vaapi-drivers-freeworld.

Dave has split the vaapi driver into a separate sub-package to make replacement easier.
* Wed Sep 28 2022 Dave Airlie <[email protected]> 22.2.0-
- mesa: split out vaapi drivers into separate package

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...SSIRO5AHNTJCG/

You build it and delete everything apart from these three files.


/usr/lib/dri/nouveau_drv_video.so
/usr/lib/dri/r600_drv_video.so
/usr/lib/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so

I haven't thought about the replacement method, that's something that can be discussed during the package review.