H.264 (or similar) encoder in C#?

Question

Does anyone know of an open source H.264 encoder in C# (or any other managed language)? I might be able to make do with a python implementation as well.

The libraries that I’ve found (e.g. x264) are written in pretty low level c (procedural with lots of macros) and assembly. Tweaking them is turning out to be far more complex than I'd thought. My project has no concern for performance or compatibility. We just want to test how some ideas will impact the perception of the outputted video.

We’d be willing to pay for or license the code if need be.

Thanks in advance!

Edit - Some important points:

1. I don't care about performance (e.g. real time encoding) at all. It could take 10 days to encode for all I care.
2. A wrapper isn't helpful since I want to actually modify the encoder itself.

Answer 1

No one would likely spend the time to develop the codec in those languages because they would be hopelessly slow for actual encoding. However, the reference implementation should be less optimized and more useful to you. It is still in C.

http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/

Answer 2

I don't think there is already such a port you need - you'll find wrappers for any langugae but a pure implementation does not have the critical mass. I'd recommend to port it yourself, document your port well and then start tweakening it.