Video Breakthroughs

These days, x264 developers are raising voice against code hijack and disrespect of the GNU GPL licence terms : "Raystream, a recent (and horrifically done) scam company advertised their "amazing proprietary encoding technology", which was of course just x264 on default settings with no modifications.". @videolan TL is giving the temperature : http://bit.ly/tCtkbl / http://bit.ly/vAjlZ3

Raystream, in a rather obscure plea, pretends to extend x264 encoder licenced by CoreCodec and to respect the GNU LGPL licence - but CoreCodec provides only a commercial licence and x264 licence is not LGPL. In a recent press-release ( http://bit.ly/vkuzZZ ), Raystream pretends that an (undisclosed) "independent international property rights management law firm conducted a thorough investigation of Raystream's algorithm and has issued an opinion letter verifying that all aspects of Raystream's software and technology are in complete compliance with the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) held by the Free Software Foundation." but no document or source code is available yet to verify these assumptions.

It will be interesting to see if Raystream can provide further evidence of the fact that they are strictly respecting x264 GPL licence terms and that they don't have to contribute back their potential code modifications to x264 codebase.

Squeeze 8 includes full support for the x.264 codec, featuring an intuitive user interface and in-product instructions that let video professionals adjust and optimize up to 48 major encoding parameters. These include key frame rates, encoding modes, and performance to adapt the H.264 format to user needs and workflows.

GPU acceleration via Nvidia CUDA is optimized for Squeeze 8, making it the best option for creating .mp4 proxy files in terms of both speed and quality, Sorenson says.

More details here : http://digitalmediaupdate.blogspot.com/2011/10/sorenson-squeezes-out-new-version-8.html