As in title. What’s your experience with it? If something isn’t executable, then it has to exploit vulnerability in order to run anything malicious. But does it happen often with mp4, mkv and other files like mp3 or epub?
I assume that if I use updated linux, then I’m mostly safe?
Typically is not possible. Those media files are basically just data files (e.g. like a .txt text file) so media players normally do not look for anything to execute inside them. And frankly people should avoid any media player attempting to execute random code found in media files.
Case in point, the old Windows Media Player + old .wmv files used to be able to direct people to random websites to download/execute malware. Leave it to Microsoft to somehow turn a movie file into malware https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/106188/can-a-rogue-wmv-file-hijack-windows-media-player
It’s not about a media player ‘attempting to execute random code’ - an exploit is found which lets it run a command that it shouldn’t. You used to be able to jailbreak phones by loading a .pdf file that used an exploit to gain root privileges and execute code. It wasn’t a feature of the PDF reader. It was a bug that could be exploited when a specific string of characters was entered to effectively crash the pdf reader and let it run its own code instead.
A txt could easily contain malware - any file could.