Free/Open h.264 video decoding libraries? (Non-GPL)

linux video h.264 decoding codec
Mark Renouf picture Mark Renouf · Mar 21, 2009 · Viewed 14.8k times · Source

The main players seem to be x264, and xvid, and both are GPL. This means we can't integrate decoding capabilities into a playback application without licensing the whole thing as GPL, so we can't use either.

The preferred target platform is Linux. Any non-viral open license is fine, we're more than happy to provide the source of any changes we make to libraries, just not our whole application.

Is there anything? Or maybe we should use GPL for now as a test during development, and plan to replace it with commercially licensed codec before shipping?

Answer

alex strange picture alex strange · Apr 23, 2009

The ffmpeg H.264 decoder is LGPL. Only the encoders are GPL, and x264 does not provide a decoder.

It also has the advantage over Framewave and IPP of actually being usable.

Related questions

Cutting the videos based on start and end time using ffmpeg

I tried to cut the video using the start and end time of the video by using the following command ffmpeg -ss 00:00:03 -t 00:00:08 -i movie.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -async 1 cut.mp4 By using the above command i want …

Read More
How can I get the resolution (width and height) for a video file from a linux command line?

I've been digging through the mplayer/mencoder and ffmpeg documentation and I can't seem to come up with anything. I'm not especially picky as to the output format as I can use a regular expression to pull it out, I …

Read More
How to convert flv to avi using ffmpeg high quality

Need to convert flv files to avi or mov, trying out ffmpeg but the output quality is terrible. How can I get the video output to be on par quality with the source? I thought ffmpeg -i name.flv -s 320…

Read More