It's good to see a response from Beamr staff. Perhaps rhetorical but....

How do you feel licensing an amazing open source tool, adding a few patches you feel needed for perceptual quality in crf encodes, and then calling it your own product? Even a "patent pending" product?

You've done one small bit of coding, building upon the _years_ of work that open source devs have done.

You present this minorly tweaked x264 as a revolution in online video and allude that it's all your work. No reference to x264 at all on your site, which I guess is your right having paid the license fee. Still not impressive for anyone looking at your product, how it works, or wondering about the toolchain involved.

How about submitting some patches and pull requests to the tool that makes your product possible? Oh wait, that's right, you'll take that product that's 99% not your work and make as much money as you can.

Are you gonna approach all the big sites using x264 and try to convince them to change to beamr? No, I didn't think so. Snake Oil semantics for the uninformed.

As a wonderful T-Shirt I saw once states " My free software runs your company ".

UPDATE

Actually I've thought long and hard about this. They might not be so blameworthy or snake oily, they might just be using FAR too broad of explanations for what they've done. We've all jumped on them because it was almost like they've said they created a new encoder.

The possibility I didn't really think of is that they have coded their own proprietary solution that, as the media put it loosely in the original piece posted here : "According to the company, the compression method mimics the human eye and removes elements that would not have been processed by the human eye in the first place." [1]

Now I don't know if their solution; #1 Directly changes/effects the x264 source code, or #2 is something that runs before encoding and simply determines x264 settings to be used. Or even a mixture of both.

#1 If the changes are to x264 itself, I shake my head and my fist at them and again point to the years of open free development done in x264. (Most notable in this case it's amazing psy optimizations which do exactly what this company is claiming to have advanced ... it adjusts quality internally for the human eyes perception instead of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.) Submit a patch!

#2 If their software is completely separate and determines x264 settings via their proprietary methods, then what they've done is not so ridiculous.

They've done a confusing job explaining things, but I can imagine at least one scenario:

----- A user uploads a home video to their servers.

Their software scans it and takes careful note of scenes with high levels of movement, scenes with human shapes moving, scenes with human faces, scene's that match algorithms for water, grass, natural environs etc etc

They then parse those notes and either set x264's many advanced settings globally, or perhaps even change each scene's x264 settings accordingly. ---

Who knows.... It's been interesting following this nonetheless,

[1] http://nocamels.com/2013/02/beamr-can-cut-video-file-size-by...