[noggin]

Using the PCM decoding from Android apps (like MX Player) for example. It's like being GMS certified, you can run Google Apps on any device but legally you can't if you're not certified. The same for DD/DTS certification, without that PCM decoding could be done, but would break the law.

Presumably this is to ensure that licenses are paid to ensure legality in some regions. Kodi and ffmpeg effectively offload this requirement to the end user - expecting us to be responsible and have the right licenses in place if we use the software. However if you sell a product with this functionality built in, you should be providing the licenses to the end user.

It's the same as the Raspberry Pi foundation providing H264 encode/decode as standard (as they have licensed this codec) but requiring a small further payment for MPEG2/VC-1 support (which will fund the license costs for these)