Comment by mastax

I can vouch for GStreamer as an API. I was using the Rust bindings so not super familiar with the C API but it looks good. GObject makes some things verbose but once you understand it you can interact with every object in the API consistently. There is a ton of necessary complexity (video is hard) but it’s really well designed and pretty well implemented and documented.

If you have a pretty normal use case the Bins (decodebin, transcodebin, playbin) make that pretty easy. If you have a more complex use case the flexibility of the design makes it possible.