[FFmpeg-devel] Funding to replace libfaac

[Dave Brueck]

Hi all,

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum - please be gentle if you need to redirect me elsewhere.

Last I read on ffmpeg-user, the built-in AAC encoder in FFmpeg is still considered experimental and generally the advice given there is to use libfaac. Unfortunately I have a few cases where I need to do AAC encoding but can't use a GPL library; LGPL would be fine, but GPL won't work due to the nature of the application.

Rather than going with one of the commercial solutions that would benefit just me, I'm writing to see if there would be interest in some funding to help accelerate the ongoing improvement of the built-in AAC encoder to the point that most people would never need to go with libfaac - the idea being that FFmpeg could be compiled without --enable-nonfree and without --enable-gpl and be able to do AAC audio encoding and get output that is at least on par (in terms of perceived quality, file size, and speed of encoding) with libfaac, if not better.

If it makes more sense to have it evolve as a separate project a la x264, that's ok too, but I wondered if it might make sense to just have it be part of FFmpeg.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea, positive or negative. Thanks,
-Dave