sudo dnf install ffmpeg --allowerasing
Because video codecs like H.264 or H.265 are covered by patents and require licensing fees to the MPEG LA. As a result, Fedora does not distribute support for them. You can get around Fedoraās position on this topic by building the binaries yourself, with support for these codecs, or by installing the binaries from RPM Fusion, as your screenshot shows.
Regarding your screenshot, may I suggest that in the future you copy text from a terminal and paste it into a preformatted text block here? That way, the content becomes searchable and accessible for screenreaders. This opens your posts to a wider group of readers.
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How then it comes they are packaged in the RMP-fusion āfreeā repo, not in āunfreeā or āuglyā? I guess only encoding is enforcing licence fees, but not decoding?
I canāt speak for why RPM Fusion puts a package in one repo or another, I suggest you ask them about that.
As far as I know, there are royalties for both encoders and decoders as well as for distributing content in one of ātheirā formats. But that information is a few years old at this point.
In any case, there are alternatives, such as VP9 or AV1, both should be supported in Fedora out of the box.
Have you tried ffmpeg-free - Fedora Packages?
they are installed per default, do not support any of the h26* CODECs
anyway, I hoped the x26_ were some kind of āfreeā implementations of the h26_ CODEC suitesā¦ nevermind then
It is nitpicking, but x264 and x265 are implementations of H.264 and H.265 (the actual codecs).
Both are free implementations, but free as in beer, not freedom (Edit: both are also free as in freedom, licensed under the GPL. What I meant was they are not free from patents, and also not free from royalties. Which is why VP9 and AV1 were created ā¦) Because they implement H.264/H.265, they are covered by MPEG LAās patent pool. There is the OpenH264 implementation, which is used in and distributed by Fedora. It also doesnāt get around the H.264 licensing issue, but Cisco pays the licensing fees.
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Thanks for the context I was not aware of, this issue can be closed as resolved.
p.s. at least anyone who wants to watch such encoded video material knows what to doā¦
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Just to further nitpickā¦ fedora doesnāt distribute this, cisco does for fedora.
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The thing that really tripped me as a beginner is that Fedora seems to be distributing popular applications without the codecs, such as VLC, Tuba and probably many others. I really struggled to understand at first why my apps were failing to play video files. The fix is to download applications from the āflathubā source rather than the āfedoraā source (which is the default). I wonder why Fedora distributes applications with broken functionality (and without warning the users) when they could just let people download from the āflathubā source.