Enabling extra decoders
The Broadcom chip actually has extra hardware for encoding and decoding a few other well-known formats. The Raspberry Pi Foundation did not include these licenses because they wanted to keep the costs down to a minimum, but they have included the H.264 license. This allows you to watch HD media on your TV, use the webcam module, or transcode media files.
They did provide a way for users to buy separate licenses if you want to use these extra encoders or decoders.
At the time of writing, the only project to use these hardware codecs was the OMXPlayer project maintained by XBMC. The latest Raspbian package has the omx package included.
Buying licenses
You can go to http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/ to buy licenses, which can be used once per device. Follow the instructions on the website to get your license key.
MPEG-2
Known as H.222/H.262, it is the standard of video and audio encoding widely used by digital television, cable, and satellite TV. It is also the format...
