Fedora Can Now Ship MPEG2 Support, But What They Will Ship Is Yet To Be Figured Out

With the last of the MPEG-2 patents having expired last February, the Fedora / Red Hat legal team is ready to okay the shipping of MPEG-2 video support out-of-the-box in Fedora Linux at long last... But they don't yet know what implementation to use.

Fedora is ready to ship the MPEG-2 video support in Fedora but are trying to settle for what to use. They are ideally looking for an MPEG-2 implementation that isn't bundled with other codecs in which they cannot ship (even in source form the other codecs would need to be eliminated) and would have to be under an LGPL / BSD / Apache or MIT licensed.

With ideally being standalone even in source form, that makes it tricky to use the likes of FFmpeg as the rest of the codec support would need to be scrubbed in source form and just not disabled as a build switch.

Christian Schaller of Red Hat is currently looking for ideas on what MPEG-2 implementation would be suitable for shipping in Fedora. One possible contender brought up so far is an FFmpeg trick used by OpenMandriva but that approach has yet to be vetted by Fedora.