[j_s]

I am interested to see how the patent side of this shakes out, it seems to be a minefield for video codecs. Is there some scenario where going open source exposes the authors/companies involved to potential trouble?

Releasing under Apache License Version 2.0 seems to cover the normal bases with its Grant of Patent License. What are the compelling reasons to choose to use the MIT alternative?

[sturmen]

It would seem that CineForm is inherently simple, so perhaps it does not infringe on any of the "more clever" codec's inventions (AKA patents). I imagine GoPro ran it through legal before doing this.

[0dan0]

Was the idea. CineForm was developed to avoid patents in 2001, by using technology that patents had already expired: 2-6 blockless wavelets, RLE and Huffman entropy encoding -- this is about that is used to make CineForm. Simplicity is what drove performance, wavelets over DCT is what helps in quality.The patent mind-field is in distribution codecs that strive for the lowest possible bit-rate, which was not a design goal for CineForm. Declaimer: I'm the author of the linked article.

[mindcrash]

That you can do whatever you want with it as long as you give proper credit to the authors when distributing work based on the licensed code:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

[mulvya]

MIT license is acceptable in GPLed projects, so potentially FFmpeg could inline the encoder.