[Libav-user] Libav, licensing, h.264

[Robert Krüger]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:58 AM, Brad O'Hearne
<brado at bighillsoftware.com> wrote:
> I have a need for processing of h.264 video in a commercial (for sale) product. I am aware that there are more or less two flavors of FFmpeg, one with GPL'd code compiled in, and another with GPL'd code disabled from compilation. In general, GPL governs the former, while LGPL governs the latter. I'm not aware of the exact functional boundaries of each, but I am aware that libx264 is apparently GPL'd, so that is a no-op for any commercial product.
>
> My question is this: is there *any* h.264 processing capability within Libav that does not fall under GPL, that is usable in a commercial product, and if so what are its limitations? Can Libav be used to handle h.264 processing in a commercial product (obviously without libx264), or no?

>From the x264 website:

In addition to being free to use under the GNU GPL, x264 is also
available under a commercial license from x264 LLC and CoreCodec.
Contact info at x264licensing.com for more details.

If you need h264 (software) encoding in ffmpeg libs in a commercial
product and you don't want to distribute the source of your
application, this is probably your only legal choice (IANAL).