On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 8:11 PM Chris Adams linux@cmadams.net wrote:
Once upon a time, David Airlie airlied@redhat.com said:
On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 4:02 AM Frantisek Zatloukal fzatlouk@redhat.com wrote:
since this mesa change ( https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa/c/94ef544b3f2125912dfbff4c6ef373fe49... ) in F37 and rawhide, the mesa package lost support for vaapi accelerated encoding and decoding of h264, h265 and decoding of vc1 ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2123998 ).
It seems like a big regression from F36 for users with GPUs with open source drivers (mainly AMD, maybe nVidia/other non x86...), that affects common use-cases of Fedora Workstation, like watching videos, in-house game streaming, attending online meetings and many more.
This was an oversight being enabled prior to this, and I think we have to remove it from older Fedora as well. Fedora cannot ship anything that causes the OS to provide an API which exposes patent algorithms.
The patent licensing around H264/H265 is such that providing this could leave Red Hat and other Fedora distributors exposed to legal problems.
But isn't this just providing for hardware decoding, where (presumably) the hardware vendor arranged for whatever needed licenses?
It's really not that simple, IANAL but AFAICT the licensing costs comes down to who provides a complete solution, the HW doesn't provide that so they may not be required to arrange the licenses.
P