Fedora 25 Finally Makes MP3 Playback Easy, Fedora 26 Might Ship It By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 25 Finally Makes MP3 Playback Easy, Fedora 26 Might Ship It By Default

Fedora 25 has a lot going for it and yet another benefit for Fedora Workstation users on the desktop is finally having an easy, official path for MP3 playback support. It's 2016 and there's finally good MP3 support coming through official channels, after in Fedora 24 they were able to finally provide H.264 support via OpenH264...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-25-MP3

[GreatEmerald]

Hm. Meanwhile here on Tumbleweed, I can't use H.264 on QupZilla, since they can't ship QtWebEngine with that. And Packman doesn't have it packaged either...

[Inopia]

MP3 technology will be patent-free in the United States on 30 December 2017 when U.S. Patent 5,703,999, held by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft[66] and administered by Technicolor,[67] expires.

Only about a year and all this silliness around MP3 can end.

[Sethox]

Only about a year and all this silliness around MP3 can end.

Haven't you learned that Wikipedia is not a great source to have?
Take Wikipedias source instead, just saying...

[Mystro256]

I take that the patents are finally ending?

[Creak]

It's not really clear why they fought so long not to include mp3 decoding even just as an official package, and now it's OK.

The patents aren't ended yet, so why the sudden change of mind?

[Inopia]

Haven't you learned that Wikipedia is not a great source to have?
Take Wikipedias source instead, just saying...

If you take a look at the article and its talk page you can see that Wikipedia actually has a lot of active editing on this subject and editors are battling over the correct date. I cannot think of better source without consulting a patent lawyer as they are doing original research on which patents affect MP3 in the US.

[zxy_thf]

I take that the patents are finally ending?

Probably only for decoders, otherwise they should provide lame also.

[smitty3268]

Probably only for decoders, otherwise they should provide lame also.

That's my guess. Wikipedia lists 4 patents expiring in 2017, and they all look encode related to me. The decoding is probably simpler so it would make sense that patents there might have been granted and expiring earlier.

[duby229]

What the article title says is that it finally makes mp3 playback easy, as if double clicking an mp3 was ever a hard thing to do......