I develop a FREE video clip manager for Mac and I want to incorporate FFmpeg command line tool in the resources folder of my application. My app will open an hidden shell and run command lines and use the created media file and movie information in the database of the manager.
Is this a legal use of FFmpeg command line tool. If not, can I invite the end user to download the command line tools and link my app to them (run them from my app)?
I develop in Xojo and as there is no FFmpeg plugin for Xojo, this is the best way to do it. I'm actually testing this way of integration and it works very well.
I was not able to find a clear answer on the page of FFmpeg.
11 Answer
Yes, it is legal.
FFmpeg is released under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or later. Some external libraries like libx264 get released in GPL 2 or later. But both of them have permissions for free/commercial usage, distribution, or modification. So you can use FFmpeg in your both commercial or free software. And you can release the software you are building in any license, it is up to you, but you also must follow the rules of the license.
Some helpful links
You can run ffmpeg -l to print FFmpeg license.
