H.264 in Fedora 17!

[Marcos Mello]

Fedora Video <fedoravideo <at> gmail.com> writes:
> As everyone probably knows, Mozilla has chosen to adopt H.264. They will be
doing this by finally utilizing OS codecs instead of embedding their own. They
have been quite clear that Linux would be supported too, so obviously this means
H.264 in Fedora. With Firefox's adoption there will be no web browser supported
on Fedora which doesn't support H.264 (Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror), and not
a moment too soon since flash support on Linux is going away.
>
> Why is Mozilla doing this?  It is clear enough: Non-support of H.264 is making
them irrelevant. They've gone from the #1 browser to the #4 directly as a result
of not adopting H.264.   H.264 is the only video that is good enough for the web
and the alternatives are just as patented which is why Google did not make good
on their commitments to deploy them. Even Youtube only offers WebM on a small
number of unpopular videos: The bandwidth demands of a full WebM deployment
would put them out of business and would break their site on apple devices which
don't work if WebM is offered.
>
> Likewise, we see Fedora's market share dwindle as it is supplanted by Ubuntu
and Debian both, not coincidentally, ship H.264 while Fedora has not.  There can
be no question of freedom here since no one doubts that Debian places freedom as
the highest priority. It is fedora's continued lack of H.264 which is actually
the violation of freedom. Who wants a desktop with zero video support?   Ffmpeg,
VLC, Mplayer, gstreamer, Blender and almost all free software video programs are
based on H.264 and Mpeg. Go look on pirate bay: No one distributes in anything
but mpeg formats.
>
> H.264 is now free for the web and has been free for a long time. It is only
foolish religion which has kept H.264 out of Fedora.
>
> Mozilla and Fedora will not be alone in making this move. Today Wikipedia
announced they would be abandoning Theora and switching to H.264 (they never
adopted WebM).
>
> It is time for Fedora to stop promoting low quality, proprietary, and
unlicensed video like WebM and Theora and adopt the industry standard x264.  Our
political preferences are worthless if Fedora is irrelevant.  It is time to
regain relevance!

You can have "H.264 in Fedora" right now: enable RPM Fusion and install the
FFmpeg libraries. libavcodec plays H.264 just fine (and I think even VA API is
supported for HW decoding).

I suppose Mozilla will use GStreamer on Linux. RPM Fusion has gstreamer-ffmpeg,
which is what you will be looking for.