On Sun, Sep 25, 2022 at 9:06 AM Robert-André Mauchin zebob.m@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
So recently Mesa disabled by default patented codecs. They added an option to re-enable it with -Dvideo-codecs=h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc,vc1dec
Dave Airlie elected to not include this line in: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa/c/94ef544b3f2125912dfbff4c6ef373fe49...
because "we don't have legal approval for this".
Could it be waived by legal to be re-enabled? Not having basic h264 decoding is quite taxing. And we all already pay patents when buying the video card.
This assumption is wrong. I can't get into specifics, but there are plenty of legal games that are played by hardware vendors to avoid paying those fees.
Others have mentioned this in the corresponding devel threat too[1].
As a distribution, we have to ensure we don't have a way to enable a complete codepath for such codecs to avoid the legal risks. There are a number of ways to approach this, but it's important that Fedora itself cannot provide a complete path to access hardware acceleration for these codecs either.
[1]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/...
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!