Embedding video codecs in files?

Question

Video

None of the five installed media players can more or less decently play a freshly downloaded file. Why not include a few miserable megabytes of the codec used directly into the file, given modern video file sizes of tens of gigabytes, so that they play perfectly on any device? After all, can it not happen that in 50 years all these files will simply be impossible to view?

Answer 1

Codec, it's not "something" that opens the file. This word means a program/library written for a specific platform (hardware, operating system). Taking into account the fact that playing video "in tens of gigabytes" is a rather difficult operation, codecs are written with all sorts of optimizations, which worsens portability, so you can forget about universality. In "iron" players, in general, decoders are in firmware or hardware. Therefore, it is pointless to embed a set of instructions in a video file.
Although container formats, for example, MKV (Matroska), allows you to embed anything: video, subtitles, hypothetically - any data.