Question

My app takes time-lapse photos, and also records audio to go with it. The problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to go about turning it into a .mov/.mpeg file (I am new to this type of iPhone development). I have heard some things about FFMPEG, but apparently the license doesn t cover the public distribution of iPhone apps. Anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

you can use Theora aka VP3. it is free to use in any application and has a pretty decent quality/bitrate ratio

Answer 2

I do not know whether the necessary parts of FFmpeg to do this is GPL or not, but there are parts of FFmpeg that are LGPL-licensed.

They have a legal page that covers this in detail, so FFmpeg might be worth a closer look.

Answer 3

FFmpeg itself can be used in iphone apps distributed on the appstore. See wunderradio as an example: http://www.wunderradio.com/code.html

BUT... I am experimenting with it right now and I am kinda disappointed with the quality of the result. (not to mention that encoding is sloooow on the iphone) It seems to me that without the x264 library it is impossible to create mpeg-4 videos with decent quality. And x264 is GPL licensed, so if you use it, you must disclose the full source of your project. (Or did anyone figure out how to select some usable codec from the LGPL-d FFmpeg?)

What I don t understand is that the appstore has now a lot of video editing apps. How do they work? I made a pretty thorough search, and couldn t find any mpeg-4 codec with a permissive enough license. Do they violate GPL? Do they use private API? I really don t believe that they built a homebrew mpeg4 encoder.

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