VLC also has the advantage of being developed in France, where the legal system does not recognise software patents.

Really! My respect for France has gone up a few notches.

Don't get too excited, in France there's a tax on all storage devices (sd cards, usb sticks, hdds, laptops, phones etc) to help subsidise the record and film industry...

Note that internal HDDs aren't taxed under this tax, only external ones. (So if you don't want to pay it, you can just buy a SATA HDd and an adaptor). Phones are taxed though (yes this doesn't make any sense technically)

Is the tax on a phone's storage capacity or its overall retail price?

On the storage capacity

We have that in Italy too, but at least that means that ripping CDs or DVDs is entirely legal. It's actually called private copy contribution.

Yep it actually came from Germany, and was afterward adopted by a lot of european countries

Germany has that too. Even on paper, since you could copy pages under copyright.

Honestly, I'd take that trade. A narrow, stupid tax is definitely the lesser of two evils here. (Especially as it means I'd have a moral license to pirate whatever I wish!)

There was a lot of back and forth [0] over this back when Firefox added support for system libraries. The FOSS purists only wanted to support codecs they could include in Gecko (long before OpenH264) while the pragmatists wanted to make a useful web browser.

Support for system libraries first appeared on mobile platforms because it was essential. At the time (ca 2011/12) the likes of YouTube and Vimeo were only delivering MP4 to mobile clients.

The purists seemed to think that somehow if Firefox held the line on (likely but not guaranteed) unencumbered formats/codecs that every content producer would see the light and go with those objectively worse codecs with no hardware acceleration for video content.

This completely ignored the fact that Flash was common on desktops and supported encumbered codecs just fine. It was in fact the primary delivery vehicle for them. The NPAPI content hole let the purists be intransigent while actually using content on the web. They were also ignoring the design of the HTML5 video tag that encouraged inclusion of multiple source formats and some sort of fallback including object embeds.

As for Microsoft they were still pushing the various Windows Media codecs as the One True Way in the Windows XP and Vista eras. They had to support MP4 with Windows 7 because every smartphone and most stand alone cameras were capturing video in MPEG-4 codecs if not file formats.

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/-xTei5rYT...

Microsoft still doesn't include basic codecs like H.264 in some Windows editions ("N" and "KN" for some regions in the EU and Korea), but those users can download Microsoft's Windows Media Feature Pack to get the codecs:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-video-audio-problem...