Tvheadend

Transcoding is pretty much handled by ffmpeg/libx264 etc, you can disable them at compile-time. There would be no advantage in removing the working code over that, but it would break many systems.

The entire codebase is complex and takes a lot of time to get familiar with. That's what makes it extremely complicated to introduce changes. Even removing functionality isn't that simple, so most likely this is not a good idea.

Fair point, but the goal is of course not to break anybodies systems Using external tooling however, e.g. call ffmpeg as an external application.

I agree that things being complex is not helping and risks breaking things, but removing something (and fully depending on external components) can also mean long term, tvheadend becomes slightly simpler.

The huge disadvantage of using the spawn profile with external ffmpeg is that it takes significantly longer as it does some stream analysis, buffering and so on. The internal transcoding works significantly better.

I've also thought about using libraries for certain things (http server, http client, rtsp server, rtsp client) but doing so would reduce features (as we have some workarounds for certain rtsp servers in place) and is a huge task.