2022-01-03

One thing I learned today was that Fedora silently(?)
disabled a couple of codecs for VA-API hardware decoding.

For those of you running modern machines (or using Intel or Nvidia
GPUs) you probably didn't notice it at all but since I'm running
a 12 year old laptop as my primary computer with an old AMD iGPU
then it is pretty noticeable...kinda.

I don't actually watch any 4K content at all and I mostly also
don't watch full-screen videos on my laptop so I didn't actually
really notice that hardware decoding for h264 was disabled on my
computer until I tried to play some 4k youtube videos I had downloaded
and also multi-task with some other things.

I quickly googled it and apparently this is related to software
patents or some other such nonsense and a new build option in mesa
libraries. it doesn't really matter.

If you want to re-enable these codecs on AMD gpus with mesa then
you can just run this command to swap the drivers with the enabled
ones in the rpmfusion repos

sudo dnf swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld

instructions are here as well:  https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia