Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy articleabout the announcementthat the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK for Flatpakapplications and runtimes.

Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtimeversion 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with therelease scheduled for April, unless application developers replace itwith the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime isunaffected, and future releases will include a newcodecs-extra extension to replace OpenH264 that includes FFmpeg with support for a number ofpatented codecs.

Considering all things, I think and hope we made the correct decisionand hopefully the new org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra worksout. libx264, libx265 and others are built from source and there areno binaries or extra-data involved. So we should theoretically be ableto patch and fix any issues that come up in the future.

Apart from all this, I'm slightly worried at the prospects of legalissues cropping up with this setup and also that the new extensioncontains "too much", but we will have to see where things flow.