Hello everybody, As you might know the H264 situation isn't very good under Linux due to patents.
This is because on countries where those patents apply it's necessary to pay royalties and for Fedora Linux a workaround is used (OpenH264) due to legal reasons - the rationale usually given is that there is neither a way to accurately gauge the number of installs nor a way to actually charge the user as the OS is available for free. Well, according to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F , we should get excited as some H264 patents expire mid-August. For context, the current approach used on Fedora relies on OpenH264, where Cisco builds the decoder and pays the licensing fees, and Fedora users just download the Cisco binaries. Optionally users can install more codecs via RPMFusion, such as by replacing the ffmpeg-free package from the repos with ffmpeg from RPMFusion or even via extra gstreamer packages. For Flatpak users there's the ffmpeg-full extension (soon to be codecs-extra in 25.08) which should fix our need. For the dates of the next patent expirations, via the Wikimedia website: > Most patents already expired, but some are still active somewhere: > > last patent in China, CN 1922888, will expire on 2025-08-16; > last patents in Japan, JP 4628216 and JP 4892628, will expire on 2025-08-09. This puts mid-August (the 16th) as a day to re-analyze the current state of the H264 patents and check whether we will have a easier time by shipping some better support by default. As a final note, H264 seems to divided in AVC (which is what we generally use and whose patents expire this month) and SVC (some efficient variant for video conferencing and streaming use cases, whose patents seem to expire in December of this year). But since OpenH264 apparently only supports AVC and not SVC, we needn't to worry about SVC's patents right now. So, my final question is: Will we have an improved multimedia experience this month with those patent expirations? Or will it take a bit longer until we can properly consume our backlog of h264 encoded content without jumping through hoops? Thanks for your time, Mateus Rodrigues Costa -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
