MP3/LAME and H264/X264

[Xavier]

I have never really understood these things. Like "LAME aint an MP3 encoder"... And the exact difference between x264 and H264.

I have visited wikipedia, but I need it a bit easier explained. Like "x264 is a free software library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams". Don't know what "library" is, but as far as I read that sentence, x264 is an encoder to "create" the format H264 or something. IF it is like that, why are videos usually referred to as x264, if it's only the encoder and not the format? And what about LAME? If it isn't MP3, what the hell is it? Why does everyone call it MP3 and it has an .mp3 ending, and yet still isn't MP3?

[Chris K]

For LAME (Lame Ain't a Mp3 Encoder), I think it's some kind of copyright issue and also a bit of a joke.
As far as I can see it's simply true mp3.
Perhaps the x264 naming has the same purpose. Actually a lot of freely distributed video encode formats are copyrighted somehow.
Copyright is often vague. Some formats started as open source and were claimed for copyright later.

[aedipuss]

just a guess about lame - it's an mpeg-1 audio layer 3 encoder. so by definition it's not an mpeg-3 encoder, but then again mpeg-3 never went anywhere and was discontinued.

[Midzuki]

Wikipedia says:

At one time, LAME was simply a set of patches against the separately distributed ISO demonstration source, hence the claim that it "is not an encoder". The ISO code had a restrictive license but was available without charge.

In May 2000, the LAME project reimplemented the last of the ISO source code, and thus LAME was then a totally new implementation — compiling recent versions of LAME no longer requires the ISO source code.

As recent LAME releases are no longer a patch against ISO encoder code, LAME is now itself an MP3 encoder; the LAME acronym has become a misnomer.