[apocalypses]

I found this very interesting, particular the comparison to x264 (which I had never heard of).

Looking into it I found x264 looked really easy to use with a nice C api but was encode only - does anyone know of a library very similar to x264 which is both encode/decode?

[stepik777]

Unless you cannot use GPL, I suggest to use x264 for encoding. It is simply the best there is. There is nothing similar to it.

[lieff]

https://github.com/cisco/openh264 can do both encode/decode.

[Game_Ender]

It has very limited support for H264 advanced profiles that are usually used, which is a down side. I was honestly surprised about the lack of a good decode library.

[stepik777]

Isn't ffmpeg's libavcodec a good decoding library?