[C-programmer]

ffmpeg has libraries. Why are you forking a separate process to call a single function? This is a very common problem I see in high level languages with poor C interoperability. Although cgo works fine, so what gives? Less code for more problems.

[treyd]

cgo doesn't just work fine, it's still treated very much as a second-class citizen by the Go tooling. It doesn't integrate with the standard build tooling properly and requires additional manual steps. You also can't really have an upstream dep that uses cgo internally, the burden falls onto the end binary to manually set the flags correctly.