Hey folks,

Just wondering what other game developers license for Video and Audio Encoders/Decoders when making mobile games (iOS & Android)?

I feel it's all too easy to end up with .mp4, and it's extremely pricy...

Anyone?

Moving this to Business/Law.

Wasn't sure, but appears obvious now re-reading my original post.

Thanks!

Do you need an encoder, or just the decoder on the device?

Video decoding tends to be quite resource intensive. However, both devices have API support for various mpeg4 decoding, with android.media and the iOS AVPlayer both supporting H.263 and H.264 AVC, both of those have some degree of support.

If you need something more game-friendly, Bink is less pricey than MP4 licenses, but still has a pricetag. If you are going through a major publisher you may be able to use one of their bulk licenses, which can make things convenient for little guys.

I'm actually doing encoding as well unfortunately, otherwise Bink felt like the most straightforward solution (but I believe it does only decoding, and is out-of-this-world pricey).

I'm currently considering using H.264 (which appears to be free to use according to VideoLan organization, but may force me to put my product under GPU license).

Thing is, I still need a video format/container, which means I'm left to use something similar to mp4 and/or mov anyway right?

My assumption is that I don't need to pay MPEGLA when using mp4 because I'm using neither the encoder or decoder (I used H.264 for that).

If you are going through a major publisher you may be able to use one of their bulk licenses, which can make things convenient for little guys.

I'd love that. Most licenses seem to have a yearly cap beyond which fees stop to pile up. Assuming I went through a publisher that has an 'over-used' license, I could end up with no fee at all.

Figured this was eventually going to end up between me and a lawyer, but well worth asking regardless.

Thanks!

Because "licensing" is in the subject line, I'd thought the question was about licenses, so moved this from the Lounge to Business/Law. I see that I'd misunderstood, so I'm moving this to Visual Arts.

I think the issue is still largely a legal one: I'm looking for a simple 'way out'. But given the platform specifications (iOS vs Android for example), it may belong in the visual arts indeed (albeit quite an unusual kind of thread I guess).