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Closing the Chapter on OpenH264


People might have noticed me talking about dropping OpenH264 from Freedesktop SDK. Here, I’ll try to go a bit into the history, the timeline and what led to the final decision.

Patents like this are a blocker to shipping software dealing with the codec in the base runtime (since we want it usable by a wide variety of vendors and free of any legal grey areas) and unfortunately makes life difficult for everyone involved. Albert Astals Cid, part of the team who maintains KDE Flatpaks on Flathub complained about this and an issue was opened by Erick555 to discuss the possibility of making ffmpeg-full a runtime extension. The 23.08 branch of the Freedesktop runtime was locked to 2.2.0 and upgrading to a fixed version was not possible due to multiple ABI breaks and SONAME bumps upstream.

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