Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

Date:
Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:20:37 +0000

Description:
Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy article about the announcement
that the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK
for Flatpak
applications and runtimes. Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtime
version 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with the
release scheduled for April, unless application developers replace it
with the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime is
unaffected, and future releases will include a new codecs-extra extension to replace OpenH264 that includes FFmpeg with support for a number of
patented codecs. Considering all things, I think and hope we made the correct decision
and hopefully the new org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra works
out. libx264, libx265 and others are built from source and there are
no binaries or extra-data involved. So we should theoretically be able
to patch and fix any issues that come up in the future. Apart from all this, I'm slightly worried at the prospects of legal
issues cropping up with this setup and also that the new extension
contains "too much", but we will have to see where things flow.

======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1015408/


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