AFAIK, VLC was the one of the first players that was able to read all sorts of formats... back in the day, you were lucky if you could play mp2 and mp4, let alone mkv/avi/etc...

Sadly VLC devs have let their software deteriorate to the point where VAAPI hw decoding doesn't even work anymore, they think it's ffmpeg's fault... except ffmpeg supports it just fine, VLC is just too lazy to update their ffmpeg calls to use the api correctly.