The problem is that Microsoft wants to pay that for a permanent “never maintain in a way that breaks caption decoding in any default behaviour we use” with that one time payment.

Its a quick fix on Microsofts end to change a quick flag in ffmpeg. It’s also quick on their end to maintain a fork that only changes the default. One time payments for maintenance make open source projects like ffmpeg subject to fail.

Hilariously the issue was just a setting change in the update, that you can easily change via a command option. They saw thing didn’t work, and didn’t read the change log at all before asking to pay a one time fee to guarantee it be maintained for them.