Maybe in audio, but video still seems like an absolute nightmare. Look at the absolute silliness with like having to pay $.99 to play h265 video in Windows.
Video codecs have historically been like this, to some extent or another. It's really just a manner of if the manufacturer has absorbed it into the price tag or pushed it to the consumer.
No one likes paying for a codec license anyways, but since patents are at play, they kind of have to.
Real example, I recorded the world series using an ATSC antenna, and I re-encoded a 90 second sample using a bunch of different settings on a 32-thread znver5:
# Codec Flags Size Speed
- ----- ----- ---- -----
Original (Raw ATSC mpeg2video) 77MB (100%) N/A
1 libx265 -preset veryslow -crf 24 37MB (48%) 0.245x
2 libsvtav1 -preset 3 -crf 44 36MB (25%) 1.87x
3 libsvtav1 -preset 1 -crf 35 19MB (25%) 0.556x
That said, I've watched so much h264-encoded video over the past decade I think I've been trained to perceive the subtle visual "snow noise" as a sign of a high quality video: I find how AV1 blends backgrounds more visually objectionable than the snow in H265, even though I think it's objectively higher fidelity. Similar to how I find high frame rate video "fake" after having watched NTSC TV for the first half of my life.
Of course there is always VLC
I thought weakest part was the size of the texture buffer.
Nobody expects the N64! Our two weakest parts are our raw RDP fillrate, and our tiny Texture buffer.
If the RDP had been clocked 4x faster and had 4x the texture size then it would have been incredible… it makes beautiful pixels!
It's why modern programmers can make it do things that would have given John Carmack sleepless nights if they had accomplished them back in 1996.
I'll also note the frame rate issues in Conker were mainly down to raw RDP fillrate issues, which was for sure the weakest part of the N64 hardware, it could draw beautiful triangles (for the time) but oh so so slowly. There was a decent amount of speech during gameplay using the RSP mp3 codec. The cartridge size was still an issue, 64Mb got a good amount of mono speech but was still very much at a premium.