The Freedesktop SDK is an open source project that provides a collection of essential libraries and tools based on Freedesktop modules for Flatpak apps and runtimes. In simpler terms, it provides a bundle of resources that allows developers to get a quick start when building new Flatpak apps that work consistently across different distributions.
It contains OpenH264, the open source video codec developed by Cisco that allows the integration of multimedia capabilities for handling the H.264 video compression standard on Linux systems.
In a recent announcement, Boudhayan Bhattcharya (aka bbhtt), a well-known contributor to the Freedesktop SDK project, has revealed information regarding the OpenH264 implementation.
What's Happening: The OpenH264 codec implementation in Freedesktop SDK has been retired, citing concerns with how Cisco distributes it, along with some legality uncertainties.
Following that, the upcoming Freedesktop SDK 25.08 release, which is set to arrive sometime in August, won't ship the OpenH264 codec but will include a more reliable solution.
Boudhayan laid out why they arrived at this decision.
For starters, Cisco's distribution method for OpenH264 has issues such as the ciscobinary.openh264.org page not having a valid SSL certificate, Cisco not providing GPG signatures or any form of strong checksums like SHA-256 for the binary releases.
Then there's the issue with security patches not being applied timely due to ABI (Application Binary Interface) compatibility problems.
What to Expect: Any Flatpak apps that use Freedesktop SDK 23.08.0 are affected by this change, with H.264 video playback not working anymore. Developers of such applications are suggested to add the new codec implementation to their app's manifest file.
The replacement codec implementation is called codecs-extra, which was formerly known as ffmpeg-full. It is built using open source libraries like libx264 and libx265, which are widely used for H.264 and H.265 video encoding/decoding.
With this, the Freedesktop SDK developers now have better control over the codec config, allowing for timely updates and patches, while also eliminating their reliance on a third-party binary that was prone to unexpected issues.
Concluding the announcement, Boudhayan added that:
Considering all things, I think and hope we made the correct decision and hopefully the new org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra works out. libx264, libx265 and others are built from source and there are no binaries or extra-data involved. So we should theoretically be able to patch and fix any issues that come up in the future.
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