Could have used this in the nineties, where hunting a specific codec to play that video you downloaded off a BBS was an actual thing.
I remember all the weird repackaged video codec installers that put mystery goo all over them machine.
The article bashes VLC but I tell you what… VLC plays just about everything you feed it without complaint. Even horribly corrupt files it will attempt to handle. It might not be perfect by any means but it does almost always work.
In most circumstances, a MPEG-TS file can be remuxed (without reencoding) to a more reasonable container format like MP4, and it'll play better that way. In some cases, it'll even be a smaller file.
(nb they did often use their own demuxers instead of libavformat)