[Libav-user] Clarifications about why "--use-nonfree" makes ffmpeg undistributable given the LGPL

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez <clopez at ...> writes:

> Then, why is that "--enable-nonfree" makes ffmpeg 
> unredistributable?

You mean: "why is libfaac making ffmpeg unreproducible 
even without x264?"
Your question is valid, the original idea was to make it 
more likely to get improvements for the native encoder.
(Instead, even more proprietary aac encoders are 
supported now.)

But note that the native encoder is not as bad for stereo 
output and the use case of needing aac encoding without 
h264 encoding is at least not extremely common.

> I understand than meanwhile the linking of ffmpeg 
> with the non-free libraries is dynamic there 
> shouldn't be any problems distributing it?

dynamic vs static linking is totally unrelated to above 
question afaict.

Carl Eugen