[OT]h.264 alternatives

[Colin Holgate]

Are you sure that a license is needed for H.264 playback? That could seriously impact the viability of YouTube or Vimeo, if all users had to pay a license fee.

My hope is that the license is just paid by the encoder tool maker. If you’re using Adobe Media Encoder you don’t have to pay a license, Adobe already did.

In the hope that playback doesn’t involve paying a fee, you could use non-H.264 encoders that make videos that are played back by anything that can handle H.264. That might allow you to use your own tool without a license fee, and still make videos that can play back everywhere.

Here is an article that talks about how to solve a gamma/contrast issue that happens with most H.264 encoders:

https://myth.li/2010/07/how-to-fix-the-h264-gamma-brightness-bug-in-quicktime/

The solution they have is to use an x264 encoder, and the article has links to a QuickTime component, so that you could export to x264 from anything that uses QuickTime. The results are better looking than regular H.264.

> On Jul 19, 2017, at 12:37 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Seems most folks use h.264 for encoding video, but being patent-encumbered it requires negotiating a license with MPEGLA for commercial use.
>