Slashdot Mirror
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..."
Indeed we do, but consider that reencoding files in vorbis and opus makes them subject to generational loss, and you'll still need an mp3 decoder for that. Plus, you'll lose the ability to share it with other people, because they won't be able to play back the file, or wonder what the ".opus" file extension is.
Its sad, but if you show this headline to random non technical people, and explained to them that fedora was an OS like windows or mac os, they will think that fedora couldn't play back audio files before.