Can we create a LGPL version of Video.FFMPEG?

[PauloPolaco]

Andrew,

I'm guessing that Video.FFMPEG is released as GPL and not LGPL solely due to the fact that FFMPEG itself is GPLv3. You can in fact compile FFMPEG itself to comply with LGPL. My question is this... if I can supply a LGPL compiled version of FFMPEG then would you consider allowing people to use Video.FFMPEG under the LGPL license?

The only thing that I wish to change is the enum and associated int array within VideoCodec.cpp & VideCodec.h that reference against the avcodec.h header in FFMPEG. That way we could get rid of the GPL requirement and build a "lite" version of sorts.

The reason I'm asking is that even if I have a LGPL compiled version of FFMPEG I can't "unGPL" Video.FFMPEG. I'm sure there are quite a few people that have pondered the same question. What do you think?

[andrew.kirillov]

Hello,

Yes, if you get LGPL licensed FFMPEG library, then you can use AForge.Video.FFMPEG as LGPL as well. It was LGPL before, but I changed it to GPL to avoid any licensing issues and responsibility for those who don't read license text.

[PauloPolaco]

That sounds excellent. I'm currently in talks with the folks at zeranoe.com so they can custom build us a LGPL version so that everything is kosher. They asked me the following:

Any external libraries?
No clue.

What build type? (static/shared)
I'm presuming that the vanilla libs they provide are built as shared?!?

Any custom configure options?
Not sure. Apart from the LGPL switch.

What FFmpeg version were you interested in?
git-01fcbdf

Btw apart from bundling it with my app, my plan here is to distribute / host a publically downloadable version in both x86/x64. This way everybody else can benefit from it and not have to go through the same process.

[PauloPolaco]

I finally got an LGPL copy of FFmpeg git-01fcbdf. I then recompiled AForge.Video.FFMPEG in both x86 and x64 flavours as .NET 4.0 using VS 2012 Update 3 and then ran some basic tests. Everything is fine. I'm wondering if we could possibly switch out the AForge.NET GPL copy with the LGPL version? If not I will then eventually release my own build of just the Video.FFMPEG component using VS 2010 as .NET 2.

If anybody is interested in getting the LGPL copy of FFmpeg git-01fcbdf, then please PM me and I'll send it your way free of charge (yes it cost a pretty penny to get it built). At this point you'd have to recompile your own copy of Video.FFMPEG against the LGPL code so that everything comes up clean. This should however be a trivial task.

[PauloPolaco]

This is an update for anybody that's interested... I finally got some time this week to throw the LGPLv3 build onto CodePlex via Git. Both the (unmodified) source and binaries are now available for download.

http://aforgeffmpeg.codeplex.com