Negative sir, well to a certain extent. Yeah you can run the game on a stock fresh windows installation, without any codecs, that's true. COD4 had an issue with Ace Mega codeds 3.1 up to 3.8, whereby the game would immediately crash if you doubleclick the EXE file. Just by Updating codecs, you could play the game 100%. The engine is so finicky, even the options you choose while installing the codec packs can cause the game to go ape. I could not use 5.1 Surround in COD4 or COD5 just because of Audio codecs, it would crash the game......
The reason I know this to be true is because of what happened this weekend. I got a mate who's pc I did way back in 2008, he just came back from overseas, and bought MW2 while at my place. His game had the EXACT same Loading screen cinematic stutter, even after I did the neccesary Graphics updates etc. Bear in mind His specs : GTX280, Core 2 Quad Extreme, 4GIG DDR2 etc etc etc.... SO I was puzzled aswell. Updated his K-lite Codec pack, and Flash, to latest versions and his problems were solved.