So a lightweight version of ffmpeg/mencoder, but what is meant by "lightweight" in terms of stream video processing? Does it perform conversions from one codec to another using less CPU cycles.
Lightweight in terms of new code on top of existing codecs: we kept it compact, meaning small binary, fast execution, and easier to add to a mobile app for instance. (ffmpeg gets big very quickly).
Also, there aren't any extra memory management system, buffer pools etc: it's all done through C++11.
We basically thinly rearchitectured around the media technologies used today in 99% of cases: mp4, mpeg ts, jpg, GIFs, VPX/WebM, WebP, ...
It still uses x264, vpx etc to do decode & encode. It's lightweight in the sense that it's a shallow wrapper around these libraries and it doesn't consume unnecessary memory or CPU cycles on it's own.