1. Raspberry Pi Codec Pack
2. Raspberry Pi Licensing

Raspberry pi 3 kodi. Raspberry Pi 2: In this video, I go over MPEG 2 decoding on the Raspberry Pi 2 with and without the MPEG 2 License Key. I also go over installing the key on Raspberry Pi under OpenELEC. On the Raspberry Pi 4, the hardware codecs for MPEG2 or VC1 are permanently disabled and cannot be enabled even with a licence key; on the Pi 4, thanks to its increased processing power compared to earlier models, MPEG2 and VC1 can be decoded in software via applications such as VLC.

Do I still need to purchase an MPEG-2 and VC-1 license keys for the Raspberry Pi 3?

1 Answer

The point of buying the license keys is to enable hardware decoding of MPEG-2 and VC-1 — see Why does the Raspberry Pi need a MPEG-2 licence? for more information on why you might want this.

While there was much rejoice recently at the patents expiring for MPEG-2, this makes little difference to Pi users, it seems. This thread claims that despite the patents expiring in most countries, the Pi Foundation won't be making any changes until 2025 until all patents are expired across the world.

You can still do software decoding of MPEG-2 without paying any fees, but performance is generally much worse than hardware decoding. If you're creating a media centre and experiencing poor playback of these video files, investing in the license key may be valuable.

Raspberry Pi Codec Pack

So, if you do need hardware decoding for MPEG-2 or VC-1, you still need to pay up, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, by buying a license key from the store (I might add that I didn't believe that was official until I saw it linked from the official blog!).

Raspberry Pi Licensing

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