There is a shortage of code flying around that works on just the 5 machines i test on. What is the point if you can’t deploy easily?
Even apps that use gstreamer have a huge list of “you need to do this with your local gstreamer for xxx to work” for more than half the faq. Its not like i haven’t tried these things. They mostly just don’t work consistently. And claiming that “they can”… well i don’t care if they won’t even work on 5 very similar machines i test on. Claiming PEBKAC is not winning points either (yes i was told that when gst seg faulted on one of my machines).
mplayer works consistently, which is based on ffmpeg. ffmepg works well too. So static binary’s with pipes seems like a great idea.