[FFmpeg-devel] use openh264 in ffmpeg

[Calvin Walton]

On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 13:34 -0800, Timothy Gu wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 1:18 AM, 王山而 <shenrh at live.cn> wrote:
> > hi
> > I want to use openh264 in ffmpeg, how should I do this?
> > please give me some help.
> > thank you.
> 
> Why? FFmpeg has a native H.264 decoder and I am fairly sure x264 
> still
> performs better than OpenH264.
> 

The only reason that I can think of for doing this is that they (or 
their lawyers) believe that their use of ffmpeg's decoder or x264's 
encoder would require additional patent licensing, and they want to 
take advantage of the patent license included with the openh264 
binaries that Cisco is providing.

It might be interesting to support this use case, but it would be 
somewhat complicated; to get the patent license covered version of 
openh264 you have to download it yourself at runtime, which means that 
the ffmpeg interface would probably have to dlload() it rather than 
link to it.

Of course, the current openh264 codec only does h264 baseline (not 
even main, let alone high...), making it of very limited use for 
anything at all.

-- 
Calvin Walton <calvin.walton at kepstin.ca>