[cruffle_duffle]

Oh man it extended well past the 90’s. Finding some weird windows video codec in a dodgy .ru domain was a time honored tradition for quite some time.

I remember all the weird repackaged video codec installers that put mystery goo all over them machine.

The article bashes VLC but I tell you what… VLC plays just about everything you feed it without complaint. Even horribly corrupt files it will attempt to handle. It might not be perfect by any means but it does almost always work.

[zzo38computer]

I had found that VLC does not play a MPEG-TS file very well (although it recognizes the file and plays it, it does not work very well); converting it to another format first, will cause it to play better, in my experience.

[duskwuff]

MPEG-TS files are just a pain to play in general. It was never intended as a file format for prerecorded video, and lacks some features (like seek indexes) which are required for reasonable playback.

In most circumstances, a MPEG-TS file can be remuxed (without reencoding) to a more reasonable container format like MP4, and it'll play better that way. In some cases, it'll even be a smaller file.

[Agingcoder]

I used mplayer ( the ancestor to mpv as I’ve just realized ) in the early 2000s which I think could handle everything under the sun back then.

[astrange]

That's ffmpeg. Neither mplayer nor VLC were doing anything special that let them "play everything". They just used ffmpeg.

(nb they did often use their own demuxers instead of libavformat)