openSUSE Making It Easier To Install H.264 Codec Support

The openSUSE project in collaboration with Cisco is making it easier to deploy H.264 codec support on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed.

Being inspired by the Fedora / Red Hat and Cisco collaboration around OpenH264 support, openSUSE/SUSE set out for a similar arrangement with Cicsco and its OpenH264 codecs.

For those interested there are now OpenH264 repositories that can be easily added to openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed / microOS installs followed by a simple sudo zypper in gstreamer-1.20-plugin-openh264 to enjoy the sanctioned H.264 codec support.

Today's openSUSE announcement goes on to explain:

Cisco, which the openSUSE Project is very thankful for their efforts, agreed to an approach on OpenH264 re-distribution via a Cisco-owned infrastructure to openSUSE users. A release workflow for OpenH264 was envisioned and a three-step approach handled via a set of scripts in openSUSE Release Tools.

A workflow script triggers and sends Cisco an email with an archive containing OpenH264 rpm packages to Cisco; it makes a snapshot of data that is then sent or “POSTed” for manual extraction of a Cisco binaries. The process ensures that the project always has a set of related binaries in the Open Build Service.

An archive is created and sent by one of multimedia:libs:cisco-openh264 project maintainers.

The package is signed in OBS by the openSUSE key, so the origin of the package can be verified. The repository metadata is published by OBS under codecs.opensuse.org/openh264.

The archive must contain only packages with Cisco OpenH264 and related OpenH264 GStreamer plugins. Addition of any other content outside of the agreement, especially other codecs, under the agreement from Cisco would lead to a violation.

Potential improvements have already been discussed to improve the existing workflow, but the initial efforts are set to provide openSUSE a more simplified experience after installation.