I wholeheartedly agree with you, if it makes you feel any better. We don't spend billions of dollars sending astronauts into space so they can float around watching Star Wars (although that would be an interesting experience, I must say)

it is a pretty fundamentally stupid thing

Seriously? There's maybe you and five other people that think that on the face of this planet. I'm fairly certain that ensuring that the astronauts had proper playback codecs was not on the list of priorities at NASA. I'd quite frankly be upset if it *was*, given that the only reason that they had an extra day was that the unforseen thunderstorm made landing impossible, and it's impossible to reliably predict *those* weeks in advance. To dedicate resources to seeing to petty details such as video playback software would be the epitome of waste and inefficiency that you are decrying. The astronauts should absolutely not be wasting time and money watching movies in space (of course, unless it's in a situation like this one where there is no more scheduled work left to be done).

Granted, maybe NASA wasn't once the wonder it once was, but that was only because of the Cold War, after the Russians and Sputnik scared the crap out of everybody this side of the Pacific. The only reason the politicians were willing to allow NASA to spend the money to send a man to the moon was so we could beat the Soviets there. But NASA has still done some pretty amazing things since. I couldn't count on one hand the number of probes and rovers they've sent to places like Mars and Jupiter, and most of those have *way* outlived their expected useful lifespan. They've been way more successful than expected. Contrast this with the Beagle 2, which was completely lost before it even had the chance to do anything even remotely useful (It was British, by the way).