 So I have made a lot of videos over the last three months about fedora and I have made a lot of claims in those videos about how I think that the fedora experience that I've had is the best Linux experience that I've had Pretty much ever and I think that over the course of those videos I've made it pretty clear that I'm a fedora fanboy now and I really really enjoy fedora I think that I've made that clear and I wasn't planning on making another fedora video for You know like at least a week because I wanted to put some distance between me and the last fedora video But there has been some news and I wanted to address it. So If you Follow me on twitter or you follow any of the linux guys on twitter You've probably heard that fedora is doing something with video codex and removing those codex from fedora in the next release now The whole situation around this is a little confusing if you're not technologically minded Or have a deep understanding over how mesa and the amd drivers work And I am not that guy like I do not understand All the technological Stuff that goes into making video work on linux. I just don't understand all of it I have some idea of it But some of it's probably just based on assumption and wrong ideas that I read on the internet So I am not an expert when it comes to video codex and video drivers on linux. I'm just not And that is evidenced by the fact that I've already done this video One time all the way through edited about 75 percent of the way through and then realized that I did the entire thing completely wrong So I'm going to try to do a better job of explaining this this time But I wanted to make it very clear that I'm not an expert So if anything that I'm explaining here is wrong, I'll apologize now instead of having to apologize later So what's this news because there is a lot of stuff out there that is not true There's a lot of this stuff out there and a lot of people's reaction to this news That is kind of overblown. So let's talk about it So I was messing around on twitter when I came across this article here and this is on foronix and my original Video that I made about this claimed that they were removing h.264 and h.265 codex from fedora That is not true And I'm glad I've decided to remake the video because that would have been completely wrong of me But basically what they're actually doing is removing va api support from fedora 37 and possibly fedora 36 and I don't really Fully comprehend what this does other than what foronix tells me it does which is speed up the decoding Of h.264 and h.265 video streams Basically what this will do is allow both of those codex to run smoother and faster So basically if this api system wasn't in place You'd have to fall back to a cpu based decoding or rely on a different build of mesa Now if you don't know what mesa is Mesa is basically a collection of apis that run alongside of a driver a graphics driver in this case That basically run the entire video stack on your system and both amd and nvidia use mesa Or at least the both the open source versions of the amd and nvidia gpu drivers use mesa from what I understand And it kind of is like an underlying part of your system that everybody uses if you're using an amd driver Or if you're using an amd card, I should say this va api Stuff was included in mesa for several releases and now they're pulling it out So a lot of people have been using it now. Why are they actually pulling it out? So according to the developers? they are Removing it because of their lack of legal approval to actually include it in their code So basically it all boils down to not having a license to use it Now there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes along with this and there has been a whole thread of stuff on the fedora forums And I will link to both of these in the video description if you want to read it more about them But basically a lot of the stuff that's been talking about is that they don't have Licensing around this api now in the forum here that i'm link going to link to Is where a lot of the confusion for me came is because a lot of people are still talking about how H.264 and h.265 are getting pulled out, but that doesn't appear to be true it's it's just the API that helps smooth them along and actually makes them usable because apparently without this va api support Both h.264 and h.265 are very very slow and almost unusable now again, that's Me taking from other people's accounts Over how this is going to be affecting fedora whether or not that's true I'm still not Sure about that because there are conflicting accounts. Some people say this is not a big deal. Some people say it's a huge deal I'm not actually sure and it's gonna be one of those things where I'm just gonna have to wait and see how it actually plays out because If it's not a big deal and it's just you know This update comes to fedora 36 or 37 or whatever And you know, I don't even notice then I know you know cares, right? If all of a sudden I get an update on my system and I can no longer play youtube videos or Make it a video in obs then i'm going to have some serious problems And really that's where this whole thing kind of boils down to at the moment because There has been a lot of talk over the last few hours over this change And some people know what they're talking about and you can kind of tell those people from the people who don't know what they're talking about And I want to be very clear upfront that I have no clue what i'm talking about And I think if you watch my channel, you pretty much know I have no clue what i'm talking about most of the time But I wanted to put this out there and talk a little bit about the possibilities of what happens next So so let's just say they pull this api out of fedora in 37 and possibly retroactively in fedora 36 And it has no effect whatsoever if that's the case my future with fedora remains the same I'm going to continue using it. I'm going to continue loving it. I'll continue making more videos than necessary on it that's One path that this could take and that's the path. I hope it takes Because I like fedora a lot So if it takes this other path where it's more negative, I'm going to be upset so the other path is is that they pull this va api out And video and anything that has to do with video becomes unusable on fedora without significant tweaking Or some kind of third-party repository with a different build of mesa to actually make it work So if that's the path that it goes down where Video basically becomes unusable without some tweaking on fedora. That's going to be a significant hindrance on my love of fedora And I think it would probably necessitate me distro hopping to something different simply because fedora will have lost It shine a little bit even if I could theoretically fix the problem caused by this change And really there's no saying that there is going to actually be a fix for this change because From some of the stuff that I read in that forum that I just showed you and that I'll link to in the video description Some of the solutions are for like putting a different build of mesa in rpm fusion But the rpm fusion guys don't seem to want to do that and they don't want to maintain mesa So that looks like it's not going to happen Some people have been talking about application specific fixes for this So like the ffmpeg developer was in that forum thread talking about how they're going to just support it Application specifically And it should work just fine with that just that application But that doesn't really help every other application that doesn't have this api to fall back on So there's a lot of back and forth over how a solution could possibly be kind of created over for this change and We don't know how that's going to play out But for me personally If it does end up with like a third party repo build of mesa that you have to install After you've installed fedora That kind of ruins fedora for me just a little bit and I know that this is hyperbole And that a lot of people have to install stuff after They install fedora in order to get their hardware to work So if you use an envidia card you have to install the envidia drivers afterwards people are used to doing that But for the people who use amd cards the experience and fedora it was so seamless You just installed fedora and you used it adding that extra step afterwards Just kind of makes fedora feel like it's no longer as accessible to not only new users But also people who aren't necessarily interested in adding extra repositories and stuff to their system so I don't necessarily think that it's going to hurt the trajectory of fedora as of right now that I know Of right now But I could see a future where fedora is not as popular as I just said It wasn't my last fedora video simply because of this change So it'll be interesting over the next couple weeks because fedora 37 comes out in middle of october as far as I'm aware It'll be interesting to see how this change actually impacts fedora because like I said There's there's those two paths either It doesn't affect anybody at all and it's just a developer back end Change that front end users don't really have to worry about or the other path Which is much more negative in that it basically makes any video on an amd GPU Workless or unusable then you know, we have much bigger problems So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out and I wanted to make this video because I wanted to put this out there for people to Kind of know that it's going on. I wanted to provide some sources For those of you who are more tech minded To read into it more to maybe understand it better than I could explain it And I just wanted to talk about how the fallout of this may or may not affect me personally and Potentially you as well. So that's it for this video if you want to Talk about this with me. You can leave a comment in the comment section below I enjoy your conversations down there If I have anything wrong about this, which I'm sure I do You can correct me down in the comment section below I will try to make sure that everybody, you know, kind of reads those down there because it's possible that It's 100% likely that there are more people out there who understand exactly what's going on than I do I'm just kind of very much glossing over the surface as such as it is So comments in the comment section below. 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