Why does everyone want it free!
If someone's downloading a fansubbed animé movie for free and don't even want to pay for the CONTENT, why would they want to pay someone ELSE for the ability to access that content?
Obviously I'm not saying people are RIGHT to feel entitled to free software. I personally paid for Mailplane so I could use Gmail which is itself free, despite the fact that it functioned just fine in Safari, and would've also been perfectly adequate in for example Prism, but when there are say, the wonderful selection of browsers that we have, and chat clients, and email clients and music and video players, and even office productivity software, people begin to get USED to that kind of thing. It isn't fair or right, but as spoiled as we often are for choice with free software, open-source and otherwise, it really isn't surprising to me that people begin to feel this entitled.
Also, VLC can often do a competent job of transcoding video and audio to other formats.
iSquint/"TinyVid" is a wonderful, ffmpeg-based one too, though I'm not sure how well it handles the .mkv container format.
