I apologize if I’m missing something simple. I connected a drive with some videos from one of my cameras to my FW 12, running Fedora 42, GNOME, i5, 32GB RAM. With the included video player and VLC, 4K and 5K files (h264, MP4 files) play as a black screen, while the audio plays. 1080P files sometimes play, but usually not, or sometimes they play at like 0.2 frames per second, while the audio plays at normal speed.
Fedora 42 is up to date. Running Kernel 6.16.4-200, but the problem persists with one or two previous Kernels as well. As mentioned, I tried the built-in video player, as well as VLC. Both exhibit the same problem. It could just be a quirk of the encoding used by that camera (It’s a generic piece of junk that I’m testing out for someone). But the files play fine on other machines I have, including a FW 13 running Fedora 42. On that machine they play in the video player app and VLC, just fine.
It seems like I’m just missing the proper codecs or something, but honestly, despite running Linux for a few years now, I’ve apparently had few enough issues that I’m still distinctly a newb, so I’m not sure what to check. As a matter of fact, I remember when I first started with Fedora on my FW 13, certain embedded videos on some websites would fail to play, saying they were missing something required for playback. I haven’t had that issue in ages on the FW 13, but I do see that message occasionally on the FW 12. It’s mostly just pointless stuff on store sites and such, so I didn’t worry about it, but maybe it’s related. Maybe it’s a driver issue with the Intel iGPU?
Any thoughts?
Edit: Just FYI, I can stream 4K from YouTube and such without issue.
kind of makes sense, i was doing some further digging and found youtube videos from a few years ago talking about how the more corporate focused distros like, Fedora and OpenSUSE, were stop shipping support for H.264 and H.265 by default. For Fedora, it seems like you have to use the mesa-freeworld package from RPMFusion.
i bet using flathub bypasses the Fedora restriction.
The friction just to play a video. Fedora ought to sort this out for the general user.
Like, the average joe isn’t going to care about codec, not going to care what H.264 or H.265 is, not going to care about Flatwhatever, and definitely don’t care about what mesa is.
For example, if I bought a counter top oven, then I want to use the counter top oven. I don’t care what heat element diameter is used. It’s things like this that make me believe the Linux distro side of things is still run by engineers / developers.
the counter top oven example would only work if you were getting the oven for free and the manufacturer was legally required to pay a licensing fee to a patent holder to include the plug that was needed to hook it up.
the oven manufacturer would go bankrupt if they not only gave away ovens for free but also had to pay to include a plug with each one.
i remember having this same problem over a decade ago with MP3 files. Fraunhofer and Thomson went after various software developers back in the late 90s for not paying licensing fees to use their MP3 codecs. As an example, MP3 device manufacturers at the time were required to pay $0.15 - $0.75 (in 90’s money) for each device they sold depending on volume and negotiated agreements with F&H, it might not sound like a lot of money, but it would be hard to justify for opensource projects that are giving away their software for free.
MP3 patents expired in the US in 2017, but now we have the same problem with newer codecs like H.264 and H.265.
Even big companies like Microsoft are not immune to this, you can pay the $0.99 licensing fee on the Microsoft App store to get a legal copy of the HEVC (H.264) codecs.
I need functionality ‘A’. The functionality is not there….until [some process] is fulfilled.
In this particular case, how one repo’s copy of VLC is working while the other doesn’t…a matter of code. “Why” are they different, I don’t know. Someone need to figure out the user experience. If it’s a matter of payment, build a payment channel in the app store to OFFER this functionality. i.e. Distros need to navigate through this to offer the feature, instead of just seeing the problem and stop. Figure out what that [process] needs to be.
Like, other product categories have done this: Car features unlock / subscription (XM radio, tracking, road-side assistance, self-driving(ish)…etc), AIX / POWER UAK (Update Access Key), Ubuntu Pro, house (needs gas and electricity…)
The friction just to play a video. Fedora ought to sort this out for the general user.
They can’t really fix it themselves other than dropping the software from their own repo. So it’s more a question of whether it’s more useful to have a mostly functional media player easily available to install on a fresh Fedora install, or just not make any available - which would force users to know about enabling Flathub and/or rpmfusion, but there’d no longer be confusion around missing codecs.
Bluefin & the other Universal Blue derivatives don’t have the issue as they remove Fedora’s own Flatpak remote and make Flathub the default out of the box. I don’t think Fedora upstream is willing to do this from what I’ve read.
I won’t pretend to understand the licensing issues and why others are able or willing to distribute full support, but they believe it’s a legal risk that they’re unable to take themselves so are not willing to do so - so I think can’t is accurate.
Yeah, it’s odd why Fedora (distro) is giving users this hell…when even Android (official, AOSP, LineageOS…etc) doesn’t seem to have issue with a frictionless video playback experience.
I’m reading that as incapable (whatever that justification might be).
This Fedora devel thread from 3 years ago when this removal of hw accel support for patent-encumbered codecs landed is quite informative.
Quoting Red Hat’s David Airlie from there:
Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle, where the person who places the last
piece in the puzzle pays the license. But then stop thinking of it
like that and just assume it’s a lot vaguer and way more legally
involved than that.
There was another discussion somewhere I can no longer find which was going into somewhat more gory legal details. One thing I remember is that there can be more than one bodies that claim to be relevant IP and have the resources to sue.
My take: Fedora, being attached via sponsorship to Red Hat’s (and so also IBM’s) resources, is a plump enough target for litigation that they have to be more reasonably cautious than other distros.
So, no progress… They got backed into a corner, or inability to navigator forward? Like, why isn’t there even an end-user friendly option to purchase the required codec(s)?
Windows → Plays video…even when unactivated. Macs –> Plays. iOS, plays. Android, plays…even random Android DAPs, play videos. Whatever hole Fedora is in…they need to get themselves out of it. Year of the Linux desktop…right…? How are other distros dealing with this?
I’m curious what video player you used. For me Totem on Arch played an H.264 video without any extra steps, but VLC installed through the official extra repo would not play H.264 until i installed ‘vlc-plugin-ffmpeg’
I used whichever video player was the default for each distro. That was VLC for MX-Linux and Manjaro, Celluloid for Linux Mint Debian Edition, (LMDE), Haruna for Kubuntu.
I think VLC with the vlc-codecs and vlc-plugin-ffmpeg installed would probably play the videos on any distro.
If you are using VLC, I find that installing vlc-codecs and vlc-plugin-ffmpeg install all the codecs necessary to play any video I’ve tried to play.
Haruna is also an excellent video player and seems to play some videos that VLC may not be unable to.
