It’s a very long time since I’ve used any software that requires a licence but I decided to try the patented MPEG2 codec licence for my Raspberry Pi, to decode MPEG2 in hardware. Now I remember why I disliked software licensing so much. This was the process I followed for the Pi’s default Raspbian operating system.
Step 1: Find my Pi’s serial number. At the command line, type: cat /proc/cpuinfo
The last line, starting Serial: is the unique number of your Pi.
Step 2: Find where to buy it. http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/
Enter the serial numer of the Pi you wish to buy the licence for..
Pay £2-40 and wait for an email. It may take up to 72 hours. I assume this is because a unique(ish) key must be generated.
Step 3: Add the following line to “the config.txt file in the FAT partition of your SD card:
decode_MPG2=0xfdb4a3ac” You may note that this is not the 10 digit hex you were expecting. That doesn’t matter. The first two digits must be implied zeros.
Others told me this meant sudo my chosen editor to add the line to /boot/config.txt then save and reboot.
and “If you want to verify that the codecs are now enabled, the following commands will report their status:
vcgencmd codec_enabled MPG2”
Step 4: Wonder why that didn’t work.
In my case, I was typing:
“vcgencmd codec_enabled mpg2”. It said mpg2 was disabled. In reality, there was no “mpg2”, because it’s “MPG2”. Case matters.
On The Outside 