I tend to agree with you on this, personally. I can't speak to the code quality or whether or not VLC is a mess (I've never really looked) but I think the poin

I tend to agree with you on this, personally. I can't speak to the code quality or whether or not VLC is a mess (I've never really looked) but I think the point here is the ability to play back (almost) any video/audio/subtitle format around which is met by both VLC and FFMPEG quite well. Being able to do that in a browser, without plug-ins, in a performant manner is important from an archival perspective (broadest audience support for the broadest array of file kinds/types). Unfortunately, the ultimate goal -- taking the control of "what codecs are supported for streaming" away from the browser vendors probably won't be met. The biggest issue there is supporting reliable playback across a variety of processors with performance/battery constraints. For desktop users it might be a doable thing, but unlikely for mobile. Granted, we're doing things on our mobile devices that would have been positively unimaginable 7 years ago, so who knows? At the end of the day, though, it's codec support that is the big win from my perspective -- lavc/lavf or FFMPEG -- not necessarily getting all of VLC ported.