Hackish ingenuity:
Not satisfied with the laggardly pace of open-source video players and the
lack of popular media formats (which are, for the most, jealously guarded
and/or patented), an enterprising hacker in Russia wrote
a video player library for Linux which can play video in the latest
popular formats.
The ingenious part is that this library uses Windows codecs, containing code
from Windows emulator projects (Wine and TWIN) to load the libraries and make
use of them.