[SOLVED] Official ffmpeg vs alienbob ffmpeg

I realized while screwing around with some ffmpeg encoding that alienbob's compile of ffmpeg seems to have many more codecs compiled within it using more flags than the standard slackware ffmpeg in -current.
I'm wondering if there are ways to 'activate' those additional codecs in the standard installation without having to recompile or use alienbob's. Nothing against either options as I've been using Bob's for quite some time it seems but I'm just wondering why they weren't included in the first place (libx265 and aac to be specific)

I always assume I'm doing something wrong ;p

I would guess it has something to do with U.S. patent/copyright laws.

You have to recompile it. Like if you use OBS studio, you need Alien Bob's ffmpeg (even just the non-restricted one.) I haven't chased down exactly what codec it needed--it was easier to grab his slackbuild and recompile the newer (at the time) version of ffmpeg.

ahhhh patent/copyright would be a really reasonable explanation.. ill take it

Originally Posted by tramtrist I've been using Bob's for quite some time it seems but I'm just wondering why they weren't included in the first place (libx265 and aac to be specific)

Even AlienBob has got two different compilations of ffmpeg, the "normal" one, which is available from all mirrors and the "restricted_slackbuilds" one, which is only available from sites outside the USA (see for that http://slackware.nl/people/alien/res...builds/ffmpeg/). The latter contains codecs which are not alllowed to be imported to/from the US.

Patent issues are indeed the problem. From the official SlackBuild;

# No default patent encumbered features:
aac=""        ; [ "${AAC:-no}" = "no" ]           && aac="--disable-encoder=aac"

Originally Posted by garpu You have to recompile it. Like if you use OBS studio, you need Alien Bob's ffmpeg (even just the non-restricted one.) I haven't chased down exactly what codec it needed--it was easier to grab his slackbuild and recompile the newer (at the time) version of ffmpeg.

It's almost certainly AAC. OBS should work fine if you configure it to use a different codec, but I haven't had a good experience changing codecs. I find it easier to just recompile ffmpeg with AAC support