Saved you a click: It was the underlying mpeg-related patents used by the DivX codec. Filed by Siemens AG.
I remember back in the day that this was why everyone preferred xvid instead.
Is it somehow important for Linux?
No.
It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).
Nowadays it’s almost entirely irrelevant. Unless you are in a tiny minority of users who need to play DivX-encoded video (a codec which is 25 years old at this point) for some reason, you don’t need to care at all.
Basically, this just made life of a few media horder nerds a tiny bit more convenient. Frankly i shouldn’t be typing out a comment this long to even explain it…
It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).
Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.
Not for linux itself, no, but for desktos distros it makes it hard to keep it fully open source and free of proprietary stuff.
I don’t actually remember when it was the last time I heard about divx. 10-15 years ago? I think that the title is clickbait and overdramatization.
It’s an xda-dev article. Of course the title is over-dramatized clickbait.
Ohh siemens ag are the baddies? I just bought their stock. I wouldnt have, had I known about this.
As a general rule, somebody is going to patent every aspect of these formats. They haven’t been demanding licensing fees from open projects, so they aren’t being baddies. The fact that they could kept a lot of projects from including direct support.
Buy stock in the companies you want to succeed, and short the ones you want to see fail.
We are on Lemmy, do we want any company to “succeed”?
It’s about DivX
So sometime in the future while setting up your Raspberry Pi to run Ubuntu desktop to run your media to the projector you can ditch the
sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Sudo apt install ffmpeg
That’s the last place I’ve seen it and it was a bad idea anyway as the Pi’s decoder sucked ass for certain media.
Such a weird writing format just to work around the ads. Just awful.
What ads?
Found the chrome user.