Almost nobody actually pays for this, since every OEM includes a volume license that's baked into the price tag. VLC includes FFMpeg so it just works ootb.

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.

That leads to absolute idiocy like this https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1p3p1hy/dell_an...