Yaks. Why Did It Have To Be Yaks?
Yak-shaving. *grrr* At least the dialogue box that told me to install that library should have warned me yak-shaving would be required, even if, "for patent reasons", it couldn't provide a way to sidestep the yak-shaving entirely.
I guess some folks will consider it a silver lining of sorts that I have gotten annoyed enough to think I should switch to an unencumbered codec on principle even though I did manage to get what I was looking for; at the moment I'm just sleepy and cranky and completely distracted from the project I started this whole excercise for in the first place.
(Oh yeah, lots of clues on the web, uh huh. But most of them only made any sense after I'd found The Rest Of The Story elsewhere on the web to provide the necessary context, a few hours into the mess.)