So, I’m wondering. Are there any updates on the whether you still need to buy the license key to decode MPEG-2 on Raspberry Pi? Ah, yes, I found a veritable explanation. Raspberry Pi is not going to make any changes to their licensing until the last patent expires in
- Because Raspberry Pi is sold internationally, and because Raspberry Pi does not have region locking like DVD players, they have no way of guaranteeing that a Raspberry Pi will not be used in the last areas of the world where there are still patents in force. And by the license terms of Raspberry Pi with MPEG LA, they do not want to risk an extremely high penalty fee of the license royalty for every Raspberry Pi sold, whether or not it was ever used with hardware MPEG-2 decoding.
So, that’s that. Also, please note that there is no noticeable slowdown for software decoding of standard definition MPEG-2 on the newer Raspberry Pis with faster clock speeds. Only the original clock speed comes with a noticeable slowdown.
20190703/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi mpeg-2
20190703/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/83237/do-i-still-need-to-purchase-an-mpeg-2-and-vc-1-license-keys-for-the-raspberry-pi
20190703/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=201449
This old Raspberry Pi Foundation blog post explains why hardware video codecs were an afterthought on the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi was originally designed with a narrow goal for education, but later on it turned out that many of the purchasers of Raspberry Pi were using it for their media center computer.
20190703/https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-video-features/