> It’s not that difficult to be honest.
Sounds easy if all you have to do is write a short comment about it. People who actually did it, like the recently retired lead of the Jellyfin project, didn't make it sound like it's "not that difficult" [1].
If you want ot vibe code a project for yourself it's probably reasonable amount of effort. But if you want to build a product, something with polish, something not held together by spit and scotch tape, something reliable, it won't be easy.
I did write a media centre around 15 years ago. What that link you shared describes is the very real toll that maintaining an open source project demands. Not the specific complexities of transcoding multimedia.
From personal experience, the transcoding was the easy part. Building a UX that was intuitive and a backend that catalogued the media accurately required far more attention.
This is such a weird comment chain. Of course transcoding media is the easy part, ffmpeg exists. Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.
Making something that actually interacts with "the human world" is 100s of times harder than writing any kind of algorithm.