Comment by hnlmorg
5 hours ago
I did write a media centre around 15 years ago. What that link you shared describes is the very real toll that maintaining an open source project demands. Not the specific complexities of transcoding multimedia.
From personal experience, the transcoding was the easy part. Building a UX that was intuitive and a backend that catalogued the media accurately required far more attention.
This is such a weird comment chain. Of course transcoding media is the easy part, ffmpeg exists. Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.
Making something that actually interacts with "the human world" is 100s of times harder than writing any kind of algorithm.