Updated packages and new Samsung repository

As some of you may have noticed, a lot of updates and new stuff has been pushed.

Highlights from the updates

• The Nvidia driver version 358.16 has been promoted as “Short Lived” for Fedora, and it has support for X.org Video ABI 20. So it is now the default for Fedora 21, 22 and 23.
• Driver version 352.63 is the new “Long Lived” driver for RedHat/CentOS.
• Both drivers have a fallback mechanism for the SELinux regression introduced in 358.09, so you don’t need anymore to disable SELinux for GDM refresh problems.
• The legacy driver has been updated to 340.96, and this as well has been enabled for Fedora 23 as it also supports X.org 1.18
• CDRtools after years of an alpha 3.01 has finally updated to… an alpha 3.02 😀
• HandBrake has been updated to the very latest snapshot and is relying only on separate source tarballs that are not statically linked. Unfortunately some are of dubious licenses as usual. Please note that there are some issues with subtitle tracks embedded in Matroska files not being correctly interpreted.
• The Nvidia NVML library and CUDA packages have seen some small update.
• Steam has been updated to version 1.0.0.51 and has updated UDev rules for the Steam Controller. If you are one of the owners of such controller, you will find support out of the box. The same changes have also been pushed to the RPMFusion package.

New repository

There’s a new repository for Samsung printers, multifunction printers and scanners that carries the “Samsung Unified Linux Driver” for both the scanning and printing functions. Just by installing it and enabling the ports in the firewall should be enough to get every device running in no time. Refer to the appropriate page for details.

Fully fledged FFMpeg binaries

Also, due to popular request, there is now a custom built FFMpeg package that drops in as a replacement for RPMFusion ones and that enables linking and support for all the codecs/encoders/decoders that would result in an unredistributable binary. This is now available the HandBrake repository. The following codecs/encoders/decoders/transports have been enabled:

• VP8 and VP9 de/encoding
• WebP encoding
• AAC (Fraunhofer, LibVO and other variants) de/encoding
• OpenAL 1.1 capture support
• BluRay reading
• AMR-WB de/encoding
• AMR-NB de/encoding
• RTMP[E] support
• H.264 encoding (OpenH264, Cisco variant)
• OpenGL rendering
• SSH transport
• Fontconfig/fribidi text support

This sobstitutes the ffmpeg binary that was provided as part of the CUDA enabled programs, as it is now tied to all the other multimedia libraries available in this repository. The support for Nvidia H.264/H.265 hardware encoding/decoding is enabled here as well and the required packages are now installed through the use of RPM weak dependencies.

The package has a different Epoch so it is not overwritten by normal updates. The idea is to have all the possible codecs supported out of the box, so also expect HEVC kvazaar (H.265), Intel Quick Sync Video (H.265) hardware support through libmfx/mfx_dispatch, CIFS transport, and other stuff, as soon as I have more time.

The same repository will be used to host the CUDA and FFMpeg enabled Blender, as it makes no sense to have a separate repository for it. Either you have a full blown multimedia collection with each component strictly tied to each other, or you just have the plain Fedora repositories with no license/patent encumbered options.

Enjoy!