vlc-shares uses ffmpeg to get information about the stream/file. This is important for 2 things:
– embedded subs (in mkv for example)
– workaround a bug in vlc: for some reason vlc has problem transcoding
h264/aac streams. As workaround for this problem must be used an alternative transcoding profile that does video transcoding and uses the original audio. So i use ffmpeg to see what kind of codecs are used by the stream and choose the right transcoding profile.
I’ve planned also for future release of vlc-shares to use ffmpeg to get thumbnails and allow audio switch in files with multi audio.