Not that you or I would care about this, but there are no royalty implications either according to the MPEG-LA FAQ on H.264 royalties, royalties are only due on “branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers” (emphasis supplied), not encoders built for your own use. No IP controversy here, FFMPEG is open source and YouTube is free to use it. Basically, the author, Multimedia Mike, was one of the creators of FFMPEG, and later analyzed files produced by YouTube and found unique file pecularities that could only have been produced by his code. So I googled YouTube and FFMPEG, and found this post Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg, which confirmed my vague impression. Since YouTube is an enterprise, and encodes more video than all other producers combined, if they did use FFMPEG, this would make FFMPEG an “enterprise encoder,” albeit one with more feature gaps than Paul Ryan’s plans for medicare. Then I remembered an impression that YouTube used command line encoding tool FFMPEG for their voluminous encodings. Seemed like defining an enterprise encoder was a reasonable first step. On the other hand, for many other producers, confirmation that YouTube uses FFMPEG might mean that they should take a closer look at how they service their own encoding chores.īy way of background, I was preparing a presentation about choosing an enterprise encoder for the Adobe Media Server Users Group.

I guess for many producers, the title is akin to “there is no Santa Claus,” or “the Republican Party’s top priority is reducing taxes for the one-percenters who fund their PACs ” obvious facts, and just not news.

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