You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding.

But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.

Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.

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rpdillon an hour ago | parent [-]

Do you still maintain it?

	▲	hnlmorg 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No. It was built before Android / Apple integrations existed and was built around tactile controls and voice interactions. But I think Apple Car play is a far far more useful product these days than anything I built 15 years ago. Even if their touch controls are an ergonomic step backwards.