On: Shells are two things

[charcircuit]

ffmpeg is a bad example as libav is a library specialized towards making ffmpeg. It's not a generic audio/video manipulation library.

[account42 → charcircuit]

Where does the requirement for it being a generic library come from? The point is that a lot of things that are available as command-line utilities for shell scripts already have a C API available as well.

And libav* is used by a lot more than /usr/bin/ffmpeg