Fedora Will Land A Free Software But "Crippled" AAC Decoder

The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."

During Friday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, they approved "inclusion of crippled AAC decoder." This AAC decoder is free software, approved for inclusion by Red Hat's legal department, and works for the most part but not completely. As discussed here, this fdk-aac decoder works but it doesn't play HE-AAC SBR reference files correctly due to missing frequencies in the output.

FESCo has decided it's fine to include this "half-working" AAC decoder in Fedora's repositories as it's better than no support at all, per the meeting minutes.

FESCo also approved the recently talked about Fedora 28 changes from better VirtualBox integration to hardening the compiler flags with better crypto settings.

Fedora 28 is set to sail in May.