Entertainment Library Synchronizer VS mpp

I've been working on https://github.com/GrokSoft/ELS for several years off and on. It's free and views media like Plex does - on a logical library basis. It's a command-line utility however it's quite powerful with many options. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac using Java. It can back-up to cloud, local and remote storage locations using one or two computers.

I cloned and built it (after building its dependencies: librga from https://github.com/JeffyCN/rockchip_mirrors/tree/linux-rga ; mpp from https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp)

There's also video4linux2 hardware decode APIs and various vendor-specific libraries, e.g. Rockchip's. On many particular platforms, doing hardware decoding without ffmpeg seems pretty approachable. Even making a nice combo library that supports a variety of them seems feasible. And obviously when the hardware's available (exists, the right kernel drivers are loaded, the C library's around if necessary, the permissions are right, it's not busy, etc.) hardware seems preferable. But it'd be nice to also support a fallback to software and then we're back to ffmpeg.

I know Rockchip have their non-standard "MPP" framework for making use of their hardware encoders and decoders at https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp which is an option if you're OK with sticking on the 4.4 BSP kernel.