Oh and turns out Fedora Silverblue 40 has broken h264 decoding right now, because the way the "legally concerning" h264 libraries get plumbed into the package tree requires OS mutability to remove a dummy package, and so under atomic distros with immutable filesystems it just breaks 😭
@mcdanlj Oh nice! Yes, I found some of the breadcrumbs for longer term fixes, but not the short-term workaround. Sadly, I hit some other issues with redhat atomic distros (not just Silverblue) that mean I'm probably going to stick with the traditional icky mutable OS for the time being, much as that saddens me :(
But also from this I learned that Cisco did a really chad move a decade ago and open-sourced an H.264 implementation, and distributes binary builds of this module that pass on their MPEG-LA patent pool license to end users ([*] for specific types of use).
So effectively, it's an open source codec implementation, with binaries that should be reproducible from said source, but the binaries also convey immunity from patent bullshit, at no cost to the end user. That's pretty neat.
Anyway that's why Fedora adds a (Cisco) repo source when you enable third-party repositories, it's so Fedora can download the openh264 builds that have magical patent immunity and slot them into the rest of the OS. Neat.
I wonder what the binary distribution license is (though not enough to go read likely very carefully worded legalese), and if a distro could conceivably have an openh264 package in their main repo, but where the package build downloads both the source code and Cisco-blessed binary, builds from source, verifies that the output is bitwise identical, then discards the source build and plops Cisco's binary into the package. Same output as a source build, but with added magical aura.
I'm guessing this doesn't happen because it's more work, and also because the patent license has restrictions on how the codec is used, which makes the licensed version unfree. And possibly also because bit for bit source reproducibility is quite hard and I'm not sure if the build env Cisco uses is documented enough to reproduce it...
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