Will H.264 Codec Support Come To Fedora? Nope.

[AdamW]

Can someone explain to me the license for H.264?

I know of several free programs that use H.264 via ffmpeg and libavcodec

So why can't Fedora use it that way, too?

Disclaimer: I'm not your lawyer. I'm not anyone else's lawyer. I'm not a lawyer at all. This is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, hire a lawyer. The following is my own undoubtedly flawed understanding, based on quite a few years of experience of talking to lawyers about this stuff.

The issue with h.264 is not the copyright license under which implementations are released - there are several freely-licensed h.264 encoders and decoders, like ffmpeg, as you noted - but the fact that the compression techniques used by the h.264 standard are heavily patented, and there is a body which is very active in enforcement of those patents (MPEG-LA).

You're not going to get sued for copyright infringement by the ffmpeg developers if you re-distribute the ffmpeg source code. But you may well get sued for patent infringement by MPEG-LA if you re-distribute ffmpeg binaries (the status of source code with regard to patent law is an...interesting topic). Effectively, patent-encumbered free software is no longer free, because you cannot exercise the freedom to redistribute it which the copyright license attempts to grant you.

It's possible to pay for a patent license in a way which allows software freedom to be properly exercised, and some patent holders are actually willing to do this; companies like Red Hat (for whom I work) have done such deals from time to time. It requires the patent holder to grant a perpetual, non-conditional, irrevocable and inheritable license to the patent - a license of a form which allows all the redistribution rights that are usually associated with F/OSS to be exercised.

But the more typical form of patent license, and the form MPEG-LA requires for the codecs it controls patent rights to, is fundamentally incompatible with free software. In these licenses, some body pays for the right to distribute software which uses a patented technique - but that right is not inherited by those to whom the software is distributed. When you buy a copy of Windows, Microsoft pays for a patent license for you for various formats covered by MPEG-LA patents - but that license doesn't include the right for you pass it on. If you copy your copy of Windows and give it to someone else, aside from both of you infringing Microsoft's copyright, you're infringing MPEG-LA's patent. Obviously, this kind of licensing just doesn't work for free software.

[DaemonFC]

Disclaimer: I'm not your lawyer. I'm not anyone else's lawyer. I'm not a lawyer at all. This is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, hire a lawyer. The following is my own undoubtedly flawed understanding, based on quite a few years of experience of talking to lawyers about this stuff.

The issue with h.264 is not the copyright license under which implementations are released - there are several freely-licensed h.264 encoders and decoders, like ffmpeg, as you noted - but the fact that the compression techniques used by the h.264 standard are heavily patented, and there is a body which is very active in enforcement of those patents (MPEG-LA).

You're not going to get sued for copyright infringement by the ffmpeg developers if you re-distribute the ffmpeg source code. But you may well get sued for patent infringement by MPEG-LA if you re-distribute ffmpeg binaries (the status of source code with regard to patent law is an...interesting topic). Effectively, patent-encumbered free software is no longer free, because you cannot exercise the freedom to redistribute it which the copyright license attempts to grant you.

It's possible to pay for a patent license in a way which allows software freedom to be properly exercised, and some patent holders are actually willing to do this; companies like Red Hat (for whom I work) have done such deals from time to time. It requires the patent holder to grant a perpetual, non-conditional, irrevocable and inheritable license to the patent - a license of a form which allows all the redistribution rights that are usually associated with F/OSS to be exercised.

But the more typical form of patent license, and the form MPEG-LA requires for the codecs it controls patent rights to, is fundamentally incompatible with free software. In these licenses, some body pays for the right to distribute software which uses a patented technique - but that right is not inherited by those to whom the software is distributed. When you buy a copy of Windows, Microsoft pays for a patent license for you for various formats covered by MPEG-LA patents - but that license doesn't include the right for you pass it on. If you copy your copy of Windows and give it to someone else, aside from both of you infringing Microsoft's copyright, you're infringing MPEG-LA's patent. Obviously, this kind of licensing just doesn't work for free software.

Anecdotally, I've heard the figure of $25 for each copy of Windows is the amount that Microsoft has to pay to license third party patents and pay out judgements/settlements for their own infringements.

I don't know if that's true or not but it sounds plausible.

[smitty3268]

It's possible to pay for a patent license in a way which allows software freedom to be properly exercised, and some patent holders are actually willing to do this; companies like Red Hat (for whom I work) have done such deals from time to time. It requires the patent holder to grant a perpetual, non-conditional, irrevocable and inheritable license to the patent - a license of a form which allows all the redistribution rights that are usually associated with F/OSS to be exercised.

It's instructive to see how Google licensed h264 support for Chrome. They have bought a license for all official copies of the Chrome binaries that get downloaded from google servers. (which gives the mpeg la a hard count of licenses to charge for)

But if you get the code yourself and build Chromium on your own, then you have no patent license, which is why Chromium has the h264 support in it disabled by default.

[ChrisXY]

You can't say anything supports Flash in a first class manner. Flash is a giant pain in the ass and difficult to manage. It has new security holes revealed on a near-daily basis, and on Linux it completely ignores the free and open source video drivers and bogs the CPU instead. And there's the small issue of it frequently misusing not only GNU libc but BSD libc implementations as well and crashing the entire browser.

The incompetence of Adobe's Flash team is staggering and the only real way to go about dealing with it is using Flashblock and whitelisting a few sites here and there.

Not entirely true.

 ~ % cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
#Hardware video decoding
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0

Flash beta 11.2.202.221


"accelerated video rendering". Finally.

But you'll notice that all skin colors are blue... Flash.

[DaemonFC]

It's instructive to see how Google licensed h264 support for Chrome. They have bought a license for all official copies of the Chrome binaries that get downloaded from google servers. (which gives the mpeg la a hard count of licenses to charge for)

But if you get the code yourself and build Chromium on your own, then you have no patent license, which is why Chromium has the h264 support in it disabled by default.

Don't worry, Chrome spies on you and gives them enough personal information to sell to advertisers that it offsets the cost of the MPEG-LA cartel licenses.

[TheBlackCat]

They do it by not caring about the legalities.

I am pretty sure they do it by being in a country that does not allow patents on software (i.e. pretty much any country besides the U.S.).

[DaemonFC]

I am pretty sure they do it by being in a country that does not allow patents on software (i.e. pretty much any country besides the U.S.).

Don't worry, the companies that own the US government are hard at work to export our patent laws.

[Gusar]

There's nothing "first-class" about Flash integration in Chrome

How about the fact that is uses Pepper? It'll do so even on Windows, if it doesn't already.

If a website is looking to support HTML5 video then VP8 would be just as valid as h264 on the desktop under those circumstances.

No it's not, for one simple reason: all their videos are already h264. Re-ecoding the entire library to vp8 and storing both is a huge and expensive undertaking. Google with youtube can afford that, but other sites do not have Google's resources. Why undertake this expensive re-encoding, which would takes months, if you can without problems rely on that people have Flash.

Google wouldn't disable it on old hardware - just new. Like when Android 5.0 comes out, for example.

And why would people buy hardware that's less capable than current hardware? They'd instead go iDevice instead. Also, if only new Android devices wouldn't be able to play h264, that'd be a very, very small percentage of all mobile users. That's doesn't put pressure on distributors to undertake an expensive re-encoding.

And exactly the type of big step I think Google has been reluctant to take.

Because it doesn't add up. If they did it a year ago, maybe it'd have an impact. Though I think not even then. Now it's waaaay too late, if they do it now they'd just push people towards iDevices in the mobile space, and the desktop space has Flash.

Don't worry, Chrome spies on you and gives them enough personal information to sell to advertisers that it offsets the cost of the MPEG-LA cartel licenses.

Umm, how exactly does Chrome spy on you?

[XorEaxEax]

No it's not, for one simple reason: all their videos are already h264. Re-ecoding the entire library to vp8 and storing both is a huge and expensive undertaking. Google with youtube can afford that, but other sites do not have Google's resources.

I seriously doubt that storing both is a HUGE and EXPENSIVE undertaking, lots of sites already store the files in both the original and a streaming version (Vimeo comes to mind) and other sites have MUCH less content than youtube.

As for the future of vpx and webm, Google is obviously commited giving how they are hiring more skillfull developers and the great progress made on the performance and quality of vp8 (download 720p webm/vp8 and mp4/x264 videos on youtube and compare, I sure can't see any visual difference and the webm file is usually smaller). What webm lacks in it's current form in order to be attractive to content providers is drm provisions (yeah I know, urk!) which is something I'm sure will be rectified as Google bought Widevine which expertize lies in content protection.

Looking past Google however is what webm is really about for me, as I think it opens up great opportunities for startups in video content due to it not carrying any licence costs. All you warez kidz out there needs to realize that this is not about the codec used on your movie and anime releases (pirates DON'T pay codec licences), it's about what is used on the web where these licence costs become a reality.

For those declaring webm/vp8 a failure because it hasn't yet taken over the web, are you stupid? The amount of inertia to push through is staggering and any progress webm does against x264 will be in tiny steps, for an example of this regard the almost universally reviled flash versus the hailed html5 and it's slow progress.

Furthermore, even if you don't want to use it and still prefer x264 you still benefit from webm's existance as without it the licencing costs of x264 would be much higher.

As for this 'article' , yes it's sad to see Phoronix sink even deeper into putrid 'journalism' by using some flamebait trolling on a mailing list as a way to throw a jab at fedora. I still don't see what Micheals endgame is, I see that he has removed the 'about linux' thing moniker from the frontpage which perhaps explains something. Is he bitter due to Phoronix not getting recognition from the Linux community? I don't know, I just don't understand why he often goes out of his way to add a negative slant to things he reports on Linux, and things like this 'article' I don't even know where to begin...

[Ansla]

(the status of source code with regard to patent law is an...interesting topic)

So the lawyers you talked to consider even distributing source code problematic?

In Gentoo there is a USE flag called bindist that disable any patented feature so that the binaries generated can be distributed without problems (used for example when building the Gentoo live DVD), but on a regular Gentoo install that USE flag is disabled by default so patented features like H.264 and the floating point textures in mesa are being built.

Wouldn't this work for Fedora as well, distribute the packages in binary format like usual, but for select packages like ffmpeg and mesa ask the user if the patented features are desired and build them locally?