Ciscobinary.openh264.org is unreachable in some countries (RU, UA, IR)

Ask Fedora
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168

good point! I’m not used to this concept yet.

let me summarize the solution:

  1. I have created a bilingual script (russian/english) that disables Cisco openh264 dependencies to ensure both dnf and flatpak updates work again in affected regions without the need of any VPN.

  2. to make sure this does not affect video playback, the script installs all necessary video codecs (including non-free ones) except Vulkan video (which i will add in the next version).

  3. the script handles Intel/AMD platforms and DNF (classic)/Ostree (atomic) Fedora variants starting from Fedora 40 and newer.

  4. as the process is completely automated, this script can be used after initial (“clean”) Fedora installation by everyone to install necessary multimedia codecs, even if you are not affected by the 403 geoblock.

  5. the script is idempotent and can be rerun many times if any parts fail for any reason. Initial system update can take some time, don’t interrupt the script, it handles errors and will not “hang”.

users can directly run the script from the terminal:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supertico/fedora-open264-geoblock-fix/main/fedora-cisco-403-mitigation.sh | sudo bash

detailed info & screenshots available on github: