It packs an awful lot of assembly-optimized codecs and transformations into it.

It would be a huge undertaking to re-write it, let alone keep up with the pace of development.

An awful lot of the video processing on the internet makes it's way through ffmpeg in one way or another.

Yeah, it feels like something I don’t want to replicate all of (because I probably won’t need all of it), but it would also be nice to be able to use the bits I need from Go without depending on C. :/