Making users care what codecs are and which are available on their system (and with no UI to even answer that question) is just another example of how bad some organizations are at UX.

That's how VLC became so popular. They realized "sorry, you don't have that codec" is only a bureaucrat's idea of good UX so they shipped every codec in software.

Ah, codecs. The biggest PITA on Windows in the 1990s/2000s. I went through two or three different videoplayers for the sole reason they shipped with whatever was needed to open just about any format out there. Meanwhile, trying to coerce WMP to open popular video formats was an exercise in futility...