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...

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[–] zarenki@lemmy.ml 11 points 6 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.