Proprietary codecs suck, and if they're asking for NDA, it must mean they don't have a patent,
so they must be relying on DMCA,
which may or may not affect you.
Besides, once they release software, they've released the format.
Comment on Re: Developing Perl against proprietary interfaces
Um, what? Plenty of companies combine NDAs with patents - Nvidia and ATI come to mind immediately. It's the legal version of defense-in-depth. The DMCA probably only comes into play if you have to circumvent copy-protection to do your reverse-engineering.