And there are all sorts of rules of thumb to go by. In my case, if something is not licensed for sale in English, in the West, then I consider it fair game. I'm not certain that would make the Japanese and Korean creators happy and I don't know what the Japanese and Korean (oh, Chinese once or twice, now that I think about it) laws have to say. On the other hand, if it weren't for fansubbers and pirating, the legitimate market in the West for this stuff would be a lot smaller. It is, at least, great advertising. And users I correspond with all purchase cds when they are available (I detest streaming).

The problem is that there's no way that I know to look up if something is licensed here. The places that I go to get my fix, respond very promptly to cease and desist requests. When one of those happens it is a pretty blunt clue.

There's lots of old stuff in the public domain. But how does a guy find out if, for instance, a particular old and non-famous James Cagney gangster movie is still protected? I wish someone ran a database where you could just simply look it up.

Oh, one more thing, for a great player/codec combo, you might try the CCCP package. It is open-source and has a great community of developers and supporters. They keep up with all the latest tweaks that people invent to improve media files. They publish one or two updates per year. So if you start to have trouble playing some files, you need to check if there's a new release out (they need to, ahem, include a feature to auto-check for updates). They use Media Player Classic for the player.