[ontheotherhand]

"the better players also play a similarly wide range of formats"

I guess the keyword is "similarly" here? VLC is the only player that plays all video clips from crappy digital cameras I owned over the years; out of the box, or with a million codec packs, neither VirtualDub nor Premiere nor other video players can parse them. I don't really care about those clips, and they sure are shoddy quality; but it always impressed me, VLC is quite the omnivore. It plays stuff even GSpot can't make heads or tail of. This might not matter for videophiles, who by definition would want their movies to be in a good and modern format, but still, yay VLC :)