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Red Hat Announces Fedora Will Support MP3 Playback (fedoraproject.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader jrincayc shares news from Red Hat's Fedora Engineering Manager, Tom Callaway. On the Fedora-legal mailing list, Callaway announced:
Red Hat has determined that it is now acceptable for Fedora to include MP3 decoding functionality (not specific to any implementation, or binding by any unseen agreement). Encoding functionality is not permitted at this time.
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
Fedora users are gonna party likes its 1999!
Welcome to the world of two decades ago!
Linux has left the 20th century.
That is so 90s...
We bypassed the damage and now have better things.
Most patents related with this have expired:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation
It's really, really very sad that we had to wait this long for this to happen, not all Fedora users live in the US and basically, the Fedora leadership has said a big 'fuck you' to those not living in a software patent tyranny.
So,.... yeeeeeeij!
I'm a long-time Slashdot lurker, this story reminds me of the early 2000's. I'm surprised that this is still an issue, the rest of the world moved on and here we are still talking about mpeg codecs. Looking forward to the comments.
No it doesn't. There was a patent on mp3 decoding and still one on encoding. Red hat not wanting to be sued by Fraunhofer opted out of paying royalties. Everyone using mpg123, xmms, etc have wilfully ignored this law because really how would a university sue every user? They don't they sue distributors. That is why Be Inc , Microsoft, apple, Ubuntu etc all pay royalties.
The patents have expired, now it can be included without violating the law
In WHAT fucking dumb ass shit hole of a country were those patents valid?
Take a wild guess.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
I am just wondering why this "big wishlist item" has taken this long. Anyone?
This type of shit really holds Linux back from the mainstream
Meanwhile every other thing made ever including my toaster has been able to decode mp3.
Even my debian has mp3 playback.
Please, let MP3 die. It's the long play VHS of digital audio.
I will stick with Freebsd thank you very much. Everything in /usr/ports is just a compile away and I can customize it to how I want
http://saveie6.com/
I dumped ripping to MP3 years ago, I use FLAC. Only reason to use MP3 is because most car stereos are dumb that they can't use FLAC or PCM-WAV, same reason for many pocket "MP3" players. Smart mobile phones can mostly read the formats, but their sound is dreadful.
If only online music stores would kill off MP3 for formats like FLAC.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
... because they paid for the privilege, or knew they were too insignificant, or too far beyond the reach of the patent lawyers. The real issue is why redhat never saw fit to include the full codec source in easily compilable form as an educational and research and fair use feature of their distro. That answer too involves patent lawyers.
They pay a royalty per device for it. Try charging a royalty per copy for something you distribute for free and see how long you'll stay in business...
This is great for Fedora users. The news comes about eight years too late for me to be interested, Fedora is one of the only distros which didn't offer mp3 playback at install time over the past decade. But it's nice they've finally added the feature.
That software patents are a joke and hinders advances in the world.
United States of Trump!
also there's ogg vorbis and flac. MP3 can die in a fire.
Technically, it won't be valid in the US of Trump. It was valid *before*...
How many more years until Wikipedia supports MP3 ? They don't give a damn about everyone being able to use their website right now. Will it change?
A country where people who spent years researching algorithms wanted to make a living while doing so.
However, I do agree that patents and copyrights should expire much sooner than they do..
how would a university sue every user?
Fraunhofer is not a university. It's a research society, notably the biggest in Europe.
This is just Fedora, i.e., beta-testing for CentOS. Who cares?
Some posters seem to think this has been difficult for Linux/Red Hat/Fedora users. It hasn't been, the mp3 support is in third party repos that are easily added. This is simply moving it from these to a core repo. This will eventually happen with all patented things (NTFS, exfat, h264, h265 etc), just some will take a very long time. User's of other platforms should be more concerned with their lacking support for open codecs e.g flac, taking until Windows 10 or still not in iTunes. But can be added as trivially to Windows as mp3 can to Fedora.
Then again, nobody serious uses RedHat. It has been babylinux from its very inception...
So far as I know this is the first time that a US company has said it is okay to have open source MP3 decoding. Ubuntu for example had MP3 decoding, but used a closed source decoder from Fluendo. Up until September 2015 there were patents that prevented this from happening.
First Donald Trump tricks America into electing him, and now this!
Hell truly has frozen over!
also there's ogg vorbis and flac. MP3 can die in a fire.
Vorbis has been superseded by Opus.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Apparently too late already, but still:
The mp3 playback support out-of-the-box is due to the playback patents all having expired.
There are still a few in effect for encoding, but they will expire next year.
After that, Fedora will ship with full support for both decoding and encoding, out-of-the-box.
It has been trivially easy, just as easy as in any other OS including Windows, to add full mp3 support in Fedora and many other Linux distributions for a long time.
And now we return to the usual bickering.
Germany?
No it doesn't. There was a patent on mp3 decoding and still one on encoding. Red hat not wanting to be sued by Fraunhofer opted out of paying royalties. Everyone using mpg123, xmms, etc have wilfully ignored this law because really how would a university sue every user? They don't they sue distributors. That is why Be Inc , Microsoft, apple, Ubuntu etc all pay royalties.
The patents have expired, now it can be included without violating the law
Actually, IIRC Fraunhofer was geneous enough to supply a loophole where open-source systems could use patented MP3 technology without being liable for royalties. Red Hat, however, has a policy that even the slightest encumbrance will disqualify a product from inclusion in their standard distros, and that includes the previous ones like Fedora as well as the clone ones like CentOS. And to be fair, Red Hat is a large enough and profitable enough business that should Fraunhofer ever decide they'd like an extra revenue source...
DVD decoding technology on the other hand...
No, there was no loophole with open-source systems. I emailed Technicolor and asked and was told no. (Technicolor is responsible for the Fraunhofer patents in the US.)
this is NOT a mp3 library finally integrated ... <ironic>these are "mp3d" and "mp3ctl", integrated mp3 support in systemd, in few week we are going to finally have "journalctl --mp3" that give us journal logging in mp3 format!</ironic>
It's great that some of MP3 is out of patent but there are many more audio / video codecs which are in patent and people need. It would be nice if Fedora could curate these codecs and stick them on RPMFusion and make it easy for people to install them without effort. I doubt it would take much effort to wrap it up in a simple UI with some legal disclaimers and present it to the user when they attempt to play an affected file.
Stay hopeful. Lincucks.
"In WHAT fucking dumb ass shit hole of a country" is Slashdot Media headquartered?
Debian is willing to put something into the non-free archive area (and things that depend on it into contrib). In fact, the existence of the non-free section on Debian servers is why the GNU project cannot recommend Debian. Fedora is more likely to instead leave out a package entirely, except for non-free firmware that executes on peripheral coprocessors instead of the main CPU. But even that's too much non-free software for GNU.
Early in my career I had some tech discussions with Tom "Spot" Callaway. Always helpful; good guy.
Algorithms and algorithm research must not patentable as long as we are not able to patent math.
Yeah right! You know a lot about business. Red Hat could use your expert strategy skills right now so go make a deal with them.