There are many packages on the rpmfusion repo that are not available from fedora. Including the full version of ffmpeg, Steam, the nvidia drivers, and VirtualBox, among many others. This is also the main location to install the appropriate codecs for multimedia that enable lots of video/audio tracks that otherwise would not be available.
If you have need of codecs, steam, multimedia tools, etc, then yes you should enable those repos.
The fedora-cisco-openh264 repo is enabled by default since the h264 codecs are needed for many things. This is a special case where fedora enables a repo with 3rd party software by default.
Since when? I think they need to tell people to not run that command in the version where Fedora enabled it by default. It’s just redundant and make little confusion imo tbh.
I don’t know, but it must be older than this ticket because the first comment there references it as a repo that already exists. It was surely already enabled by default. (That said, you can see from the comment history that it took much longer for us to actually figure out how to install OpenH264 from the enabled repo.)
The repo is enabled by default.
The openh264 package with the codec is not automatically installed and the user must do that manually.
This has to do with licensing in that fedora provides the repo for the package but cannot install the proprietary codec which requires a fee (which is paid by cisco for fedora users).
I believe the change was made since there are regions that could not access the fedora-cisco-openh264 repo and could not perform updates so f44 changed that.
It requires user action to replace the noopenh264 package with the openh264 package.
Please remember that fedora cannot distribute software that is restricted by licensing, proprietary code, or is otherwise encumbered and not freely distributable.
This is not a bug, but a decision that was made since fedora could not be upgraded after initial installation in those regions where the fedora-cisco-openh264 repo was not accessible. It is far above my level of decision making.
Also be aware that a simple upgrade where the fedora-cisco-openh264 repo is accessible seems to automatically replace the noopenh264 package with the openh264 package. I confirmed that with a new installation in a testing VM.
$ dnf history info 4
Transaction ID : 4
Begin time : 2026-04-24 00:32:48
Begin rpmdb : fba658421a2abe07a74016838173de04c09a564d557aa9e2be1211f12f4edc13
End time : 2026-04-24 00:32:49
End rpmdb : 55c68998a37dae4641531154afe73021c9dae76831782f237b8b779bbc79c871
User : 1000 Jeff <jvian>
Status : Ok
Releasever : 44
Description : dnf upgrade
Comment :
Packages altered:
Action Package Reason Repository
Install openh264-0:2.6.0-3.fc44.x86_64 Dependency fedora-cisco-openh264
Install mozilla-openh264-0:2.6.0-3.fc44.x86_64 Dependency fedora-cisco-openh264
Replaced noopenh264-0:2.6.0-4.fc44.x86_64 Dependency @System
