Fedora Linux Can Finally Offer AAC Audio Codec Support

Fedora is now able to bundle and offer a specific AAC audio codec implementation as a package for its Linux distribution.

With Fedora always striving for free software and ensuring its legal state is in order due to Red Hat's control, it was only earlier this year Fedora was legally allowed to begin offering full MP3 support for both decode/encode along with AC3 support while last year it received H.264 support. The latest multimedia expansion for Fedora is now being able to distribute an AAC codec.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) has been around for two decades now and is the default audio format across many devices and services. AAC has been a mess for free software as a patent license is needed for all manufacturers/developers of AAC codecs. Projects like FFmpeg offer AAC support in source form but as a binary isn't legally permitted in US and other locations.

Fedora is now able to distribute a third-party modified version of the Fraunhofer FDK AAC codec for Android. This FDK AAC codec is adapted to work with the mainline (non-Android) Linux stack and GStreamer. This FDK-AAC package supports both encoding and decoding of AAC.

This codec will now be just a sudo dnf install fdk-aac command away while no other AAC implementations are permitted for packaging on Fedora at this time. Confirmation via the devel list.