[cube13]

There was a time(early 2000's) when lots of fansub groups were experimenting with brand new codecs and package techniques(like mkv).

MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.

VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.

Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.

[ANTSANTS]

Codec support isn't that much of a problem nowadays, true. The plugin system is still useful for the reasons I mentioned: Adjustments and custom plugins that for the most part only dedicated AV-nerds care about.

However, consider that an H264 successor will arrive at some point, the anime scene will probably adopt it well in advance of everyone else (like it did with Hi10p), and flexible codec support doesn't seem so pointless after all.