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

[phoronix]

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

For Fedora Linux users currently making use of Mesa's VA-API support with the open-source AMD graphics driver or similar and using it to speed-up H.264, H.265, or VC1 decoding, you may soon be out of luck and will have to fall-back to either using CPU-based decoding or be relying on an unofficial/third-party Mesa build...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API

[lumks]

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.

[blacknova]

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.

Strange question, mesa with enabled codecs will migrate to rpmfusion, similar to other projects.

[patrick1946]

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.

[user1]

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.

[Mahboi]

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.

[mxan]

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.

UPDATE: mesa-freeworld package coming into RPM Fusion will solve this issue. https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6426

[ms178]

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.

[Danny3]

This is pretty bad!
Out of the box experience is very important.
New users will not easily know that their software is incomplete and they need to download additional codecs.
If they don't have internet in that moment or at all then it will not work at all.
I definitely can't recommend such a distro to anyone and I will not anymore!
With such garbage laws, why the fuck people still care about US software patents?
And why the fuck doesn't Fedora move to Europe or any other country that doesn't care about imbecile laws?
I always thought that decoding is not something that is patentable, but I guess in the US you can patent anything.

[fagnerln]

Fedora is probably the best distro, but they make some really weird decisions over the time. As it's on kernel, I sincerely don't think that they will face issues as (probably) every other distro will have it enabled.

This reminds me of the partial flathub support.

They should improve the OOTB experience