It’s truly amazing how almost all SDKs that cost a ton of licensing fees are technical garbage. The one that I am dealing right now doesn‘t even build without manual tweaks.
Free SDKs are much better quality than that.

IMO, free software often comes from a place of passion rather than urge to earn money – hence better quality.

Mess with video codecs.

Go on.

I dare you.

There is literally an industry around "making these wildly incompatible standards look vaguely similar". ffmpeg does "OK", but legally IIRC it's like "we have some patented stuff and didn't pay licensing fees, don't blame us if you get sued".

@atheist ffmpeg vanilla is FOSS. But all the actual useful codec plugins are patented...
And yes. commercial sdk, especially long running ones with multiple versions for many runtimes is total shit. It usualy starts with a good idea that got sold for a few $$$. but then someone greedy came along, and increased the price, and "expanded into a new market", then "we can sell it for more if we add dumb feature #1" and the slippery slope....