I guess it matters to some people who pirated 500 GB of movies using DC++ back in the day.

The one button in the installer you are remembering is actually unrelated. It's the gahnome people taking worst from winblows as usual and sticking with it after the last benefits die.

This time it's the video codec system (instead of just using ffmpeg lul), they called it "gstreamer". If you try to install ALL gstreamer plugins, it will be some two digit gibibyte number (don't remember exactly). The button in the installer installs most popular plugins.

Now, applications that try to use it will do anything but tell you what you are missing. Segfault, "whoopsie daisy unknown error", just hang around and so on and so forth. Chances are, it's not in dependencies either, recommended or required. One would think the ffmpeg plugin in the base set can do anything, but as it turns out it can't. For some reason.

Eh well, I appreciate you typing all that out as someone who remembers divx and xvid from long ago.

It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).

Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.

I don't actually remember when it was the last time I heard about divx. 10-15 years ago? I think that the title is clickbait and overdramatization.

Yup. install the Orion Browser. It has adblocking built in. Then install the Piefed Web application from Orion.

Or, if you wanted phone wide, configure adguard dns: https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

you can use ublock lite if its ios 16 or newer. or adguard for older versions.

alternatively theres reynard browser which is a full gecko firefox port and also runs ublock origin

Here you go!