>Windows provides both its own media and GUI layers Yes and using the Windows APIs in any meaningful way requires the user to install a ffmpeg-based backend fo

>Windows provides both its own media and GUI layers Yes and using the Windows APIs in any meaningful way requires the user to install a ffmpeg-based backend for it anyway (LAVFilters) as it is insufficient in and of itself. And even this leads to problems often enough that media players seem to bundle their own version of LAVFilters anyway (defeating the purpose of using the API...at this point why not just use ffmpeg directly?) and forego using the globally installed ones. Unless the system APIs can cover every use case that a software could need a library for, and do it just as well as the commonly used standard, I think the fact that there are some Windows APIs for some of these things is kind of beside the point. This dependency problem will still rear its head at some point.