anotheryou also pointed me to: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14802/can-i-use-ffmpeg-in-a-commercial-product https://video.stackexchange.com/question

anotheryou also pointed me to: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14802/can-i-use-ffmpeg-in-a-commercial-product https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14802/can-i-use-ff... I remember looking into this a while ago in quite a bit of detail: https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-04-know-your-rights-h-264-patent-licensing-and-you.html https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-04-know-your-rights-h-264-p... (there's plenty of other links to this). Long story short, MPEG LA owns some patents that relate to h264/h265, and you need to pay them A LOT of $ in order to use these codecs. Using ffmpeg will not devoid you of that. Also, even somewhere on the ffmpeg page, when I last read it, it will say something more in the lines of "we're not lawyers, so take this with a grain of salt". > a number of programs will externally fetch FFmpeg and just interop with the libraries or FFmpeg app. As far as I know unless they are actually free, they could end up being sued by MPEG LA. I remember at some point that's what I wanted to do - just download and use ffmpeg as an exe. But if I read stuff correctly, I do think I'm not allowed to do that - in other words you (as an application) are allowed to open a web browser to the link, but it's the user who needs to do the actual download and install. ---------- So all in all, after doing quite a bit of research, seeing how vague the licensing from MPEGLA is and all that, I started looking for alternatives. I found one (from Microsoft), and that's what I'm using. At this point, it satisfies most of my needs (even though I had to do lot of optimizations on top of it) -- in case this won't hold true in the future, I may revisit the whole ffmpeg mambo-jambo :D