Most distros have a checkbox during the installer that will add non-free components. It’s a separate EULA you need to agree to so they can’t do it for you.
You may not care, but the distro provider’s legal team absolutely cares about not getting sued for automatically bundling components with an incompatible license agreement
The non-free components I’ve seen on installers are usually for Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Not codecs.
Sounds like legal panic if you ask me. There’s been no precedent for litigation on use of licensed codecs which most have been using either way prior in their builds and packages.
Multimedia codecs have a different license agreement than the OS so they aren’t bundled by default for a reason
I don’t care about the licenses. If I click on my media and it refuses to play because some codec is omitted by default, am annoyed nonetheless.
Most distros have a checkbox during the installer that will add non-free components. It’s a separate EULA you need to agree to so they can’t do it for you.
You may not care, but the distro provider’s legal team absolutely cares about not getting sued for automatically bundling components with an incompatible license agreement
The non-free components I’ve seen on installers are usually for Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Not codecs.
Sounds like legal panic if you ask me. There’s been no precedent for litigation on use of licensed codecs which most have been using either way prior in their builds and packages.
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They have never gone after said distros all those many many years they have bundled licensed codecs in their ISOs. What changed?
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More annoyed when the distro doesn’t even bother to document how to properly install the “missing” codecs.
Don’t mistake this as condescension, but doesn’t VLC solve all of that?
Nope. VLC uses system libraries, unless you install through something that ships its own dependencies like flatpak.
I’ve heard it’s great for opening any file. Is it good with a bunch of file formats as opposed to media codecs?
VLC is good everywhere even though it cannot compare to MPV in number of features available. It will work for most people just fine.