Haha, yeah. In ffmpeg's sort-of defense, the libav* APIs are supposed to be semi-private, which is how they try to get away with them being terrible & unstable. But in practice they're public, and everyone uses them, because the only alternative is gstreamer and oh boy do you ever not want to dive into that mess.
FWIW if you just want to en/decode AV1 and don't care about anything else like container formats, you can just use the codec directly. Dav1d is the current gold standard, I believe. Even some container APIs aren't too hard to deal with, if you do need that.
FWIW if you just want to en/decode AV1 and don't care about anything else like container formats, you can just use the codec directly. Dav1d is the current gold standard, I believe. Even some container APIs aren't too hard to deal with, if you do need that.