VLC for Commercial usage?

[w0ts0n]

Okay so when I started at my company I thought "Hey! We could use VLC, that would be awesome and solve a bunch of issues with playing video files"
My asset management team get back to me, directing me to the below text:

What about personal/commercial usage?


Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.

With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.

This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.

Now this is a real issue for me because currently a lot of our IT time is spent trying to resolve video issues.
Can VLC direct me to who needs to be paid royalties so we can resolve this issue (a link would be very nice) as I currently have no idea of which codecs are to be paid for.

[w0ts0n]

Anyone?

[VLC_help]

You have to buy licenses if you want to use VLC commercially. You might get sued if you don't buy licenses. But VLC devs won't sue you, MPEG LA et al could.

VLC or videolan doesn't sell licenses, you have to contact license holders directly.

You can also remove certain .dll files from VLC and only watch/stream Theora video and listen Vorbis audio which are patent free. Then you don't have to worry about licenses.

[w0ts0n]

You have to buy licenses if you want to use VLC commercially. You might get sued if you don't buy licenses. But VLC devs won't sue you, MPEG LA et al could.

VLC or videolan doesn't sell licenses, you have to contact license holders directly.

You can also remove certain .dll files from VLC and only watch/stream Theora video and listen Vorbis audio which are patent free. Then you don't have to worry about licenses.

I know that, but WHO are the license holders, it's very vague.

[VLC_help]

but WHO are the license holders

This varies between countries. AFAIK there isn't any list available. So easiest thing is to make list of codecs you are going to need, and then find out who controls the patents in your country.