So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will cover all needed use cases sufficiently.
As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario.
Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads, ffmpeg isn't nicer either.
Well, that's exactly the point. It's been around for dark ages. Today things are different.
For new codecs like AV1 there are new and efficient decoders too and they are only getting better. It's not all limited to ffmpeg which is using external decoders anyway, it doesn't decode things itself.
Bink fits the bill today and has fit the bill since forever. I don't see any of the alternatives having similar performance characteristics, ease of integration or availability on platforms that are more or less closed and there's no indication of them being open in the future.
In adition to that the switch cost is quite high so any other alternative has to be good, and I haven't yet seen a contender.
Ah, you mean that 1% market share on Steam, sorry.
So instead of trolling again, analyze where it's heading. I don't see any reason why Bink can't be replaced by free codecs.
I can call Epic, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Google when something doesn't work as expected, free codecs dumped on github, who knows.
PS4/XB1 have been enormously more powerful than PS3/Xb360 and yet almost all games on those consoles that play a video do it using Bink even if both consoles have that AMD hardware you mention.
The current generation PS5, etc is way more powerful than PS4, and yet bink still seems to still dominate in the limited titles that we can see.
We use Bink because it is better then the open-source alternatives, and that's it.