MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.
So, do you still use an MP3 library or have you switched to another format or means of listening to music such as (spying built-in) streaming services?
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:07AM
A Very Minor Nitpick - most will contain specialised HW to support audio & multimedia decoding, and specific codec libraries to exploit that are fairly common - https://developer.arm.com/technologies/dsp [arm.com]
You're completely right in your point though: This is generalised HW acceleration, and not tied to a specific codec...