Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a "Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement." This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, "Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least)." Unity is swiftly coming to it's demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
Exactly.
Also, I think there was some question about whether it was legal to use ffmpeg under the hood depending on the use case (commercial). I imagine a plugin used inside commercial games would certainly violate licenses based on non-commercial use.
But seeing how my original comment was received, I doubt many here are actually interested in why it may be necessary. Let the anti Unity circle jerk continue.
If you're using it commercially you should be building it such that it only supports what you need, and what you need should be something not patent encumbered. Because why would you shell out money for an inferior codec when you can choose freely what to encode your stuff with.
"Should" and what's actual reality in multi national copywrite / license / patent law are rarely the same. Especially in this case where you have to include other people's work (codecs and media players) just by the nature of the problem.
I only told you what you should do if you don't want to get into legal trouble, that it's simple, easy, and a good idea even if it wasn't for US-specific bullshit. If people don't to act sensibly, well that's on them.