Commercial licensing for x264?

Jason Garrett-Glaser:

Now the best video encoder in the world — the undisputed winner of the 2010 MSU encoder comparison and the magic behind video systems by Google, Facebook, Avail Media, Vudu, Hulu, and many more – is available for everyone to use, even commercial software vendors. No longer do commercial application developers need to rely on overpriced and inferior competitors.

The proposed license fee is $1 per copy, which is reasonable, with a minimum of 10,000 copies, which is a kick in the face to small independent developers who might be benefiting from using x264 in their commercial projects. And these fees are on top of licensing fees that you will have to pay to MPEG-LA, though those don’t kick in until you’ve produced at least 100,000 units.

If you develop on iPhone, you’re probably better off waiting for Apple to reintroduce the encoding frameworks that they yanked out of iOS 4 (likely because they weren’t finalized yet), or you can just bundle an ffmpeg binary with your project and circumvent the licensing problems altogether.