title: Purging rpmfusion link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/purging-rpmfusion/ author: phil2nc description: post_id: 8151 created: 2014/08/08 00:32:55 created_gmt: 2014/08/08 04:32:55 comment_status: closed post_name: purging-rpmfusion status: publish post_type: post

Purging rpmfusion

For a very long time one of the first things I did after finishing a Fedora Linux install is install rpmfusion. No more. Although I've been stung more than once over the years by the inevitable conflicts between the official Fedora repository and rpmfusion's "meta-repo", the report on TechSNAP 173 about the apparently lax security on rpmfusion's site made me go back and examine whether I really need it installed. It turns out that I don't. There were really only two applications I was using it for: the Avidemux nonlinear video editor (NVE) and ffmpeg media management tool. One thing I didn't like about how these were packaged was their insistence on installing "nonfree" packages containing codecs that I had already licensed from Fluendo. What I soon found was that I could easily replace both pieces of software without relying on rpmfusion. Instead of Avidemux, I'm using the video editing features of Blender (not as easy to use but functionally just as good). To keep things as simple as possible I also settled on a 64-bit static build of ffmpeg whose binaries were simply copied into /usr/local/bin (a nice touch would be to instantiate all the man pages as well, something I'm working on and hope to share a recipe for in the not-too-distant future). When cleaning up by uninstalling all rpmfusion packages, I was able to list all the packages installed on my system from rpmfusion with this one-liner:

yumdb search from_repo rpmfusion-*

(this will find all packages in the yum db from rpmfusion-free, rpmfusion-free-updates, rpmfusion-nonfree and rpmfusion-nonfree-updates) Back when making and playing home movie DVD was something a lot of us wanted to do on Linux the media companies did everything they could to suppress that kind of activity. Now that we're in a post-DVD era, they might regret that decision. Both ogg for sound and webm for video are becoming popular. Serious artists in the independent music and video businesses have begun to publish direct to the Internet, bypassing the middlemen who have restricted the playback of content to the point that people like me don't even bother looking for software to do it. P.S. Anyone wanting licensed codecs for gstreamer should really go visit Fluendo, the Spanish company that not only sells gstreamer based products, but also contributes heavily to that open source project. They make up-to-date versions of the mp3 codec for free (to allow you to verify the compatibility of their build with your system), both in tarball and package formats.

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