[winswitch] Fedora33 xpra h264 encoding support not working

[Michael Cronenworth]

On 5/26/21 2:52 AM, Terry Barnaby via shifter-users wrote:
> Is there any reason why the Fedora system packages should be so different ? I can 
> see they wouldn't be so up-to-date but I would have thought the Fedora maintainer 
> would take the upstream as close as possible. It would be a better user experience 
> and probably less support if they were basically the same. 

Most video codecs are patented. H.264* and HEVC still have active patents that 
require licensing. Fedora does not ship software that is encumbered by patents that 
requires licensing. Xpra relies on ffmpeg and ffmpeg cannot be shipped in Fedora so 
the Fedora repositories ship a version of Xpra with all of the patent encumbered 
features disabled.

RPMFusion is a third-party repository that lives outside the USA where Fedora is 
based. You could have Xpra shipped in RPMFusion and have all of Xpra's features 
turned on and available. It's entirely possible for Antoine to ship his packages 
there instead of his own repository.

Regards,
Michael


* OpenH.264 is shipped in Fedora, but it has limited format support and it is a 
plugin for Firefox.