The new version of Fedora will ship with mesa 22.2 and it seems they have some legal issues building some patent encumbered codecs, specifically h264 and h265.

I saw today that slackware-current has updated mesa to 22.2, and since the slackbuild recipe has not changed, it should come WITHOUT these codecs because the default list of codecs to build is empty and left to distributions to fill as a custom build setting.

I'll wait a bit before upgrading since i need to figure out if I'm impacted by this change. I have an intel integrated gpu that in theory should bring its own codecs with the driver, but if i understand correctly amd users are screwed and need to rebuild mesa enabling the codecs.

Now, compared to other distributions, slackware seems to be more open on distributing proprietary stuff, such as kernel firmware, but in this case there's patents involved.

Any thoughts on this?

It's about encoders, the decoders are usually OK.

It's something like: you are "free" to watch H265 encoded videos, BUT you will make Uncle Sam sad if you encode your videos as H265 without paying the tip.

Now, the content of videos you watch is another story, and you may already made very sad your Uncle Sam.

However, in the graphics cards case, the real things, both the encoders and decoders are in the hardware you bought. OR, at least in the proprietary firmware which you load in your hardware.

So, my humble question is: WHY you should pay the tip, when you payed already the hardware?

IF you must pay the tip, then I believe that the way of Raspberry PI is most fair one: you want hardware H265 encoders? You should pay the license for a little particular firmware.

thanks LuckyCyborg, but looking at the removed compile option in fedora i see that there are also h264 and h265 decoders involved.
I understand that intel ships its own decoders with their graphics drivers, but it seems that amd does not and relies on mesa code to enable the functionalities.
Again, i should not personally be impacted since i own an intel integrated graphics, but i'm worried for amd users and for possible future purchases of amd gpus.

I might not be understanding how this works, but if the slackbuild recipe hasn't changed doesn't that just mean that the build options for Slackware haven't changed from Slackware's 22.1.7 build, not that it hasn't changed anything from default? So surely if Slackware's version was built with the codecs for h264/5 before, it still is?

If you look at the meson options file, the option to build video codecs appears in mesa 22.2 but not in 22.1.7. It seems like a new option, and by default is assumed as an empty list.

2 members found this post helpful.

Ah, missed that, thanks. Glad I didn't update, then.