And for softwares like VLC that have a special place in our hearts ('K-Lite Codec Pack' [1] was my special friend until the moment I discovered VLC many-many years ago), there is or there should be a firewall rule that says Enabled-Block-Any-Any-In&Out.

[1]: https://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

Ps: remember those days that we were looking for codecs for our Windows Players back in the Win95-98-2000-XP days???