[mythtv] Android build

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 6:36 AM Jean-Yves Avenard <jyavenard at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's why OpenH264 is free too, there's a license to pay but Cisco
> has reached the cap already.

For those still playing along at home, note that
you must use the binary library that Cisco has
signed/distributed to be covered under the Cisco
license terms (and I seem to recall Firefox
would download the library as needed if not
otherwise disabled).  Many Linux distributions
make pulling in the Cisco libraries easy (if
not automatic).

The yearly fee cap for H.264 (I think it is around
$10M/yr) is a minor cost to a tech giant, and in
the case of Cisco, they were most interested in
video conferencing, where H.264 was more or
less the standard, so it was in their business
self interest to get it out there everywhere.  It
should also be noted that not all IP has license
caps (and license caps were removed in later
MPEG-LA licenses (the more cynical might
suspect that the IP holders learned a lesson
about how tech companies can use such
license terms to the tech companies
advantage)).

But to add complexity to the issue, GPU
hardware support of H.264 (or H.265 for that
matter) is generally not licensed on Linux, so
distros that respect IP holders rights must
disable GPU hardware decode[0].  Annoyingly,
there is (essentially) no way for an individual to
license the inherent hardware capability of
many modern graphics cards (and an
enterprise license is "complicated").





[0] As before, the legal details are complicated,
but the summary is only the final combination
(software and hardware and distribution)
requires a license, but it does require one, and
typically there is no way to acquire one (at
least for individual end-users).  And this is one
more reason why Linux users can't have nice
things OOTB.  I do wish I could use GPU
hardware accelerated H.264 (as my older
desktop otherwise can be challenged by some
more complex H.264 content), but such is
life[1].

[1] "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our
lot in life." applies to those who use Linux
on their desktop, too.