[donatj]

Back in the very early aughts I used to carry around to friends houses a binder full of movies also containing a bootable CD with some linux distro that existed explicitly for playing media. I don't recall the name, it's likely long dead.

When whatever movie we wanted to watch failed to play on their computer, likely due to codec problems (it used to be a hassle before VLC) I'd pop the bootable Linux CD in, reboot and bam we were watching the movie. It was great.

[guestbest]

Knoppix was great for that. It wasn’t the lack of VLC necessarily that was the problem it was all those proprietary codecs that essentially install anti-cheat rootware that would also DMCA anyone who made open source codecs that could read the media.