Ive never had to download a codec to use VLC, it should come built-in with every codec you may reasonably encounter on commercial DVDs.

Is “prior art” not still a thing?

I mean, that was Getty Image’s whole case against Google’s “view image” button. And Getty won that legal battle, so clearly they have some legal ground to stand on, even though most people would think it’s bullshit.

You could always put it into service as a network wide ad blocker with PiHole. Might also speed up web browsing a bit too, since PiHole also works as a DNS cache.