Codecs are a legal grey area that many distros are choosing to include out of convenience since there has not been a problem before. Since Fedora is associated with Red Hat/IBM which have a lot of money and are bigger targets for lawsuits, they are choosing to play it safe by not officially supporting many codecs. It is the same with openSUSE.
They sadly can’t do that for legal reasons.
Will we see a change with this at least with H.264 since its patents are expiring? I hope so.
didn’t realize that was a legal issue. why can other distros automate it when installing the os?
Codecs are a legal grey area that many distros are choosing to include out of convenience since there has not been a problem before. Since Fedora is associated with Red Hat/IBM which have a lot of money and are bigger targets for lawsuits, they are choosing to play it safe by not officially supporting many codecs. It is the same with openSUSE.
They either have some licensing agreement with the IP holders of these codecs or do it on legally questionable grounds.