But why?

Wouldn’t it be better to spend the same effort writing ffmpeg modules and interfaces in Rust?

keeping external dependencies to a minimum

This is… concerning, too.

Media processing code is difficult. It’s not even a pure coding problem, and often involves human perception, extensive, expensive experimentation and esoteric, buggy hardware APIs . Hence the whole point of ffmpeg is basically integration of external libraries, with immense amounts of labor already put into each.

There are some Rust libraries they could pull in though. I guess it’d be reasonable to focus on newer formats/codecs that have Rust implementations already, and let ffmpeg handle weird legacy formats.