Unfortunately hardware decoders are not allowed in Fedora anymore. See this article for more information.
I’ll let somebody else answer this.
High profile is supposed to be fully supported; Red Hat and Endless sponsored that work a few years ago. But it looks like you’ve discovered this isn’t fully true? I wasn’t aware of this problem with 10 bit depth video. I’m not a multimedia expert and don’t have more to say about this.
I’m not sure. The challenge is we need to be confident that any decoder you want to enable is actually noninfringing. I’m not aware of anybody working on that. E.g. we can’t just enable the H.264 support in ffmpeg because we don’t know whether it implements stuff newer than 2005 (it probably does?). Even when all relevant patents are expired, we might be stuck with only OpenH264 if nobody is working on figuring out what we can and cannot do. So I’d say this is a help welcome area. Upstream H.264 decoder projects have decided to ignore patent issues and probably won’t be much help, so we’re kind of on our own here.
Unhelpfully, Fedora Legal has all but disappeared, so the IP risk decisions here will probably be made by Fedora developers who are not qualified to do so rather than by lawyers who are. The damage to Fedora and Red Hat if we get this wrong could be considerable, so we need to be really confident we’re not messing up.
I’d really like to see this change, but right now the status quo is we won’t be ready to change anything even if all patents expire. So contributing to improve OpenH264 is a safe choice for now.
This isn’t true. The Cisco repo is always enabled. The software is built and signed by Fedora, even though it’s being distributed by a third party.
(Actually, only their repo metadata is enabled. The repos themselves stay disabled.)