Since Homebrew/homebrew-core@c1057cc#diff-8f4deb87ce96b9c5efe97be3288bb406 , it's no longer possible to build ffmpeg in Homebrew without x264 and x265.

This means that an OSX build built after 2018-10-17 would be covered by GPLv2.

This is also the primary reason for the builds timing out: when you brew install ffmpeg, cmake, x265, ffmpeg and a few lesser libraries are built which combined takes a lot more than 20 minutes (in particular, cmake takes ~15min, x265 -- ~20min, ffmpeg itself -- ~10min).

Possible solutions are:

• Ask the upstream to reintroduce --without-gpl.

  Not sure if a Brew formula can be tuned to not require x264 and x265 in this case.

• Build ffmpeg from source directly like in Linux.

  • Will need to calculate the dependencies and compiler flags by hand (paths to Brew-installed libs in particular).
  • Also need to detect and install upstream updates by hand.
  • Caching the result is a problem since it will be spread spread around /usr/local. make dist doesn't seem to be available in ffmpeg's Makefile.

• Fork the older formula and use it instead of the stock one.

  • Will have to maintain it yourself, of course.
    • Dependencies in particular are a time bomb.
    • Need to detect and install upstream updates by hand.