Having lived through the age of Kazaa and Morpheus, where it was on the end-user to scour the shady web looking for magical codecs that would let our silly anime videos render properly, I don't particularly miss it. Despite the fact that Windows Media Classic + K-Lite Codec pack perhaps ran a little faster on my student laptop, I remember being overjoyed that a single, standalone binary (VLC) could play everything I threw at it. It could even fit on my thumb-drive, allowing me to run it on a friend or family's laptop if they were having trouble with a particular video file.

Even Media Player Classic and K-Lite use the codecs from ffmpeg, and don't implement their own.