if your going to tell me to use vlc, you have a point but think of the average user, they are paying for it unironically 😭. just what have we come to...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] euphoric_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 43 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

i use linux - all codecs are already preinstalled there on most distributions, and if not, they are available in the repos for free (like everything else in there). why cant it be included in a $150 os which is owned by a muli billion dollar company? they are just sucking more money out of clueless individuals.

[–] zarenki@lemmy.ml 11 points 8 months ago

Nonfree media codecs like HEVC/h265 are affected by US software patents. Distributing them from US servers without paying license fees to MPEG LA can put the host at risk of lawsuit. VLC, deb-multimedia (Debian), and RPM Fusion (Fedora) all avoid that by hosting in France, but even with those sources enabled patent issues can break things like hardware acceleration. Free codecs like AV1/VP9/Opus avoid all these problems.

Microsoft is US-based and can't avoid those per-install fees. They could cut the profit from every single Windows license but apparently chose not to.