Hello community !
I just install Fedora SilverBlue on my computer, and I got an issue when I try to watch some video/audio. I think it’s a codec issue. I installed VLC and got this error (same with gnome video and mpv):
VLC can’t décode « eac3 » format (A/52 B Audio (aka E-AC3))
or
VLC can’t décode « hevc » format (MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265))
Fedora ships incomplete codecs for legal reasons. Other countries still have the same laws but they are not enforced. Those codecs are nonfree, meaning Fedora would need to pay money for every download, making them poor very quickly.
Rpmfusion is hosted in France, where those restrictions are not enforced.
Then there are ublue variants of the Atomic images, which may have some downsides (like no automatic version upgrades, or not using an ostree remote but OCI containers), but they preinstall those codecs.
If you use Flathub Flatpak Firefox and media players (Celluloid or VLC are good), the codecs come from Flathub which also doesnt need to fulfill those legal requirements for some reason.
The only problems where you need local codecs are:
Thumbnails for nonfree videos in Filemanager
using binary or Fedora Firefox
using ffmpeg or other locally installed tools for efficient media manipulation
Thank you very much people! This really works when fresh install of Fedora refuses to play big video files with VLC. I just had to uninstall VLC from repos and install VLC from Flathub. And it worked.