How necessary is openh264?

Ask Fedora
1

I can’t upgrade from Fedora 39 to 40 due to this error:

  • package openh264-2.4.1-2.fc40.x86_64 from fedora-cisco-openh264 obsoletes noopenh264 < 1:0 provided by noopenh264-0.1.0~openh264_2.4.0-1.fc40.x86_64

Current layered packages are:

LayeredPackages: distrobox ffmpegthumbnailer generic-logos generic-release gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 openh264
rpmfusion-free-release rpmfusion-nonfree-release steam-devices

Isn’t gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 redundant?

I want to understand the risks of these layered packages for future upgrades and the importance of openh264. I mainly need it to generate thumbnails in Nautilus. Since I’ll rely on Flatpaks, I don’t think I need additional codecs. Thank you!

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2

openh264 is not important for your system, it’s the playback codec for h264 video. I don’t think it’s used for encoding either.

See this Github thread for more details:

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3

So try

rpm-ostree uninstall gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 --install libavcodec-freeworld

This will make video playback work and is the less intrusive method.

I explained all available methods in a howto

4

Thank you very much! It appears that only libavcodec-freeworld is required, nothing else. I considered reinstalling noopenh264 to prevent any potential issues, but I received this intriguing message:

rpm-ostree install noopenh264
error: “noopenh264” is already provided by: noopenh264-0.1.0~openh264_2.4.0-1.fc40.x86_64. Use --allow-inactive to explicitly require it.

Once again, thank you! I will implement the same for the individuals for whom I installed Fedora, ensuring they have as few layers as possible.

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5

noopenh264 is provided by the atomic Fedora versions to solve some dependency issues when Fedora can’t ship the openh264 without risking being sued by the patent or copyright holder of open264. The library provided by noopenh264 is a stub library which just return an error when called.