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.
Is there anything VLC can’t play ? Why not use the same libraries ? Would it be illegal for Valve to use that?
VideoLAN (organization behind VLC) is in France, which is outside US juridiction. The methods used by VLC are authorized/legal. Software is also not patentable there. That’s why it’s still up after all these years. You can learn more on their site: https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
Valve, however, must obliged to US juridiction meaning they can’t do the same as VLC. Software can also be patented when meeting certain technical requirements.