I know you are joking, but speaking of libraries, you can now create custom video players with libVLC in less than 100 lines, and get a lot of features in a few hundreds lines. (VLC is now based on libVLC)
And that works on all platforms, including Android and iOS, and gives you both hardware decoding and FFmpeg libavcodec software decoding.
Without having the complexity (and sometimes performance issues) of GStreamer.
Would you need a license for H.264 and other codecs, if you wanted to put up a fully open source MIT-licensed custom-purpose libVLC-based player that you created on the iOS, Android, Mac, et al app stores?
And that works on all platforms, including Android and iOS, and gives you both hardware decoding and FFmpeg libavcodec software decoding. Without having the complexity (and sometimes performance issues) of GStreamer.