I see it a lot in visual novels, older PC games and PC ports of older non-PC games. It sounds so trivial on paper, like… just play the video? But I know it’s not. Why though? Can we ever expect the problem to be fully solved? Right now it kinda seems like an uphill struggle, like by fixing cutscene playback in one game doesn’t really seem to automatically fix it for other games, so it’s not a situation where a convenient one size fits all solution works.
And I don’t really get it, because if it’s related to video codecs, there are only so many codecs out there, right? And then you also expect that there’s probably just a few popular ones out there that’ll be used for 99% of all cases, with a few odd outliers here and there perhaps.
It’s not just a FOSS issue; it’s a software patent issue.
VLC doesn’t attract a huge amount of attention because they don’t really make any money and would just get forked if someone did try to destroy them.
However, larger distros with commercial backing (OpenSUSE springs to mind) often won’t directly include potentially patent-infringing packages, so you have to get them from a quasi-third-party repo like Packman.