At some point, I had a similar issue (though not related to licensing), and it turned out it was faster to do a high-bitrate H.264-encode of the stream before sending it over the FFmpeg socket than sending the raw RGBA data, even over localhost… (There was some minimal quality loss, of course, but it was completely irrelevant in the big picture.)
No, because I had hardware H.264 encoder support. :-) (The decoding in FFmpeg on the other side was still software. But it was seemingly much cheaper to do a H.264 software decode.)
