I freshly installed Fedora Linux Workstation 43 on my PC and tried to play a video. The video played, but it was blank. It turned out there was an issue with the missing video decoder required to run this video: H.264.
The issue is that this encoder is proprietary and does not come with Fedora by default due to licensing restrictions. To fix this, I had to dive into the world of FFmpeg and package management.
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The Mystery of the “Missing” FFmpeg
There is a huge library of multimedia encoders and decoders out there called FFmpeg. I needed to check if FFmpeg was installed in Fedora and if it included the H.264 encoder.
I used the command:
dnf list installed | grep ffmpeg
Surprisingly, I got nothing. However, when I ran ffmpeg directly in the terminal, the command worked! It was strange to me how a command-line utility could be available even when it didn’t appear as “installed” in my package list.
Finding the Culprit: ffmpeg-free
It turns out Fedora comes with a “free” version of FFmpeg that excludes proprietary encoders. To solve the mystery, I first checked where the command was running from:
which ffmpeg
# Output: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
Then, I passed this path to RPM to check which package exactly owned this file:
rpm -qf /usr/bin/ffmpeg
The result: ffmpeg-free-7.1.2-2.fc43.x86_64.
This confirmed that the “free” version was installed, which lacks the H.264 proprietary encoder.
The Solution: Swapping to RPM Fusion
To fix this, I needed to enable the RPM Fusion repositories and swap the limited version for the full one.
1. Enable Repositories
First, I enabled the free and non-free RPM Fusion repositories:
sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
2. Swap the Packages
Then, I used this command to install the proprietary version of FFmpeg and remove the pre-installed free one:
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing
Fixing Lag and Crashes
The codec was installed successfully and the video played, but I hit another problem: the video was lagging heavily and the player sometimes crashed.
The default video player tries to find the right codec automatically, but sometimes it tries to roll back to the “free” version or struggles with dependencies. To enforce all multimedia apps to use the preferred encoding packages, I ran:
sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
What does this command do?
@multimedia: This is the group in which all multimedia-related apps are grouped by Fedora.install_weak_deps=False: This prevents the system from pulling back in the limited “free” versions as optional dependencies.--exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin: This stops the GUI software store from interfering with our manual codec setup.
After running this, the H.264 videos played perfectly smooth!