[wmf]

Apparently ICVT paid for x264: http://x264licensing.com/adopters

In general, the market tends to solve the "you've done one small bit of coding" problem; if a proprietary product is only epsilon better than the open source version then people will only be willing to pay epsilon for it. Conversely, if people are willing to pay real money for that small bit of coding, then by definition it must be a valuable bit. (It's even possible to make money by selling unmodified open source with some slick marketing, which really tends to annoy hackers because it implies that the marketing is worth more than the code...)

Also, "you must provide your source code modifications back to x264 LLC" http://x264licensing.com/faq

[midvar]

^ "you must provide your source code modifications back to x264 LLC"

Very nice find, I'm ridiculously happy that that provision is in there.

So then it may well be they have their own software that determines x264 settings as I outlined above.

[DarkShikari]

I'm going to check with CoreCodec (the folks helping us administer x264 LLC) and see what's going on here. If they're abusing the terms of the license, we'll make sure things get fixed. If not, we'll publish all the changes they've made -- and honestly, I would be shocked if they've done anything significant besides change the program name.

[midvar]

^ The man himself. My mind is now at rest, and I look forward to your report.

I too would be rather surprised if they changed anything but the program name.