I wonder if in future someone could write a competitor to these C based media libraries in Java. Today it wouldn't really be ideal, but the combination of Graal native image, such can build standalone native libraries with C ABI interfaces, the new vector API and eventually value types, means Java should become competitive for the sorts of high performance media tasks that C currently dominates. And being a standalone shared library means it would be feasible to make a drop in compatible replacement for ffmpeg.

Of course we're still some way from this being possible but over 1000 fixes and still going means ffmpeg and the like can never really be trusted. Add the blog post says, it's not safe to use with media of unknown source but the whole point of media is to come from other people. How often do you play video from sources you don't trust? It happens all the time. The only reason it's not chaos today is we proxy everything through giant re-encoding farms like YouTube, and browser sandboxing.