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Raspberry Pi been scummy for a while e.g. locking codecs behind extra payments. It seems they've gone full mask off at last.

Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0].

0. https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ

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The codec unlock is a thing of the past pretty much, they dropped the affected hardware decoders entirely in the Pi4/5 [1]. In any case, if the legends of Pis being genuinely affordable options back then are true, I'm fine with it. A lot of (probably most) use-cases don't require these codecs, so paying $1.20 and $2.40 respectively seems reasonable for those who do need it.

[1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

The legends are true. I remember begging my parents to get me a Raspberry Pi sometime in the mid 2010s, and the cheap model was US$25 (and the less-cheap model was $35).

Admittedly, this may be closer to $40-50 in today's money (and didn't include an SD card, but those were more common back then in the era of digital cameras)...

The codecs at least had a reasonable explanation - it took a few dollars off the price of the unit (licensing fees to Microsoft and the like). There was also nothing stopping you from decoding MPEG2 with ffmpeg on the CPU. Those specific codecs aren't even present on newer Pi units.

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