H.264 in Fedora 17!

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 03/21/2012 06:56 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 01:46 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Avi אבי Alkalay אלקלעי  wrote:
>>> What are the legal tools that Ubuntu uses so it can ship H.264 ?
>>
>> It's based on the Isle of Man, not in the USA.
> 
> Regardless, as far as I know, Ubuntu does not ship h.264 encoding or
> decoding support in any of its standard, official releases. It has only
> done so in custom OEM builds, with specific licensing agreements in
> place - the systems provided with h264 support were licensed. See
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/05/canonical_h264_video/ , for
> e.g., from when this 'ubuntu ships h264' meme first started going
> around. It really doesn't. If you google 'ubuntu h264', what you get are
> lots of instructions for installing packages from third-party repos.

Note that Debian does include a decoder by default for both MP3 and
H.264 but they can only do so because they are a non-profit and the
worst case scenario is a injunction until they remove the infringing
parts so realistically noone is going to go after them because one
cannot extract money from Debian.

Rahul