Until W7, Microsoft didn't ship a decoder for H.264. Neither Microsoft nor Apple ship support for MPEG2 (you have to pay extra), and nobody supports Xvid.<p>Yet Microsoft's Windows Media Player 'just uses ffmpeg' to play these formats when you have one of the many DirectShow packages installed, and has since the beginning. Apple's Quicktime does the same when you have Perian installed. Opera uses GStreamer for &#60;video&#62;, and does the same when you have gst-ffmpeg installed.<p>Google is mostly paying for H.264 decoder licenses because they were already going to have to pay broadcaster-level encoder licenses.