• Freedesktop SDK and OpenH264: The Freedesktop SDK was born from the 1.6 Flatpak runtime image. It now includes runtimes, Flatpak extensions, a bootable image stack, and docker images. H.264 is widely used but patented. In 2019, the html5-codecs extension was added to workaround the patent issue. Later, Cisco's OpenH264 was added as an extension.
• Flaws and Challenges: There were flaws in the OpenH264 setup. Cisco's binary hosting site lacked a valid SSL certificate and didn't provide GPG signatures or strong checksums. This led to MiTM and supply-chain vulnerabilities. Upstream security fixes with ABI breaks couldn't be fixed. The ffmpeg-full extension was created but not added to the runtime manifest, causing problems for app developers.
• Changes and Decisions: To compensate for dropped loaders, other codecs were added to the runtime. The ffmpeg-full extension was renamed to codecs-extra. Due to the availability of FFMPEG's internal H.264 decoder and the libx264 encoder in codecs-extra, the org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264 extension became unnecessary. A high severity flaw in libopenh264 led to various issues and the extension was eventually dropped.
• Epilogue: The decision to drop the OpenH264 extension was made considering the flaws and difficulties. The new codecs-extra setup builds from source and is expected to be more maintainable. There are concerns about legal issues, but the future remains to be seen. The author thanks Endless and others for their contributions. Fedora was also affected by the changes and is looking to create their own OpenH264 extension.