what percent of users can play vp6 flv files?

[disgust]

I know the adoption rate of flash is astronomically high, but how many of those installations are up to date?

[Dark Shikari]

Well considering VP6 (IIRC) is used by Youtube, I would guess that its an extremely high percentage, probably even more than the adoption rate of WMV9.

[disgust]

youtube uses the old sorenson codec.

[benwaggoner]

WMV works out of the box on ~95% of the world's computers, and is available for most of the rest. No way is that not higher than the Flash 8-9 installed base.

(note that the methadology Adobe uses for their metrics focuses on consumers, and so undercounts work computers).

[Dark Shikari]

WMV works out of the box on ~95% of the world's computers, and is available for most of the rest. No way is that not higher than the Flash 8-9 installed base.

(note that the methadology Adobe uses for their metrics focuses on consumers, and so undercounts work computers).
But VP6 works on all major OSs, WMV9 only works on Windows machines, and even then only on the ones with the latest updates; Windows 2000, which makes up a very large percentage of work and corporate machines, doesn't have Windows Media Player 9 installed by default.

I'd say much less than 95% in reality.

The other issue is that the hassle one has to go through on other operating systems to play WMV9 is considerably greater than the hassle one has to go through to play VP6. Especially if one wants to abide by copyright law.

[akupenguin]

MPlayer/VLC/Xine/FFdshow. Not that I'm saying those are installed everywhere, but they play both VP6 and WMV9, so that makes both formats equally accessible as far as I'm concerned.

[benwaggoner]

But VP6 works on all major OSs, WMV9 only works on Windows machines, and even then only on the ones with the latest updates; Windows 2000, which makes up a very large percentage of work and corporate machines, doesn't have Windows Media Player 9 installed by default.

I'd say much less than 95% in reality.
How recently have you seen Windows 2000 numbers? They've dropped a lot in recent years. Also, for corporate managed desktops, we've long provided both a WMV9 enterprise updater and codec packs, so even enterprises using 2000 have been able to update the players and codecs.

The other issue is that the hassle one has to go through on other operating systems to play WMV9 is considerably greater than the hassle one has to go through to play VP6. Especially if one wants to abide by copyright law.
Copyright law?

For Mac OS X, Flip4Mac is a perfectly legal solution. VLC is available for pretty much every OS and has WMV support now, but IANAL.

And of course Silverlight will be relesased very soon, with a low-friction Mac/Win installer.

[Dark Shikari]

Copyright law?
Isn't w32codecs and such questionably legal?

[benwaggoner]

Isn't w32codecs and such questionably legal?
Redistributing someone else's binaries contrary to the license? IANAL, but that doesn't sound like appropriate behavior to me.

But just because illegitimate media playback is available for a platform doesn't mean that legitimate playback isn't.

We have a full C++ source code implementation of the WM playback stack available for license. That's what products like Flip4Mac and the Kinoma Media Player are based on.

[zambelli]

Isn't w32codecs and such questionably legal?
But VLC doesn't use Windows codecs - it uses FFmpeg/libavcodecs. I suppose there might be licensing requirements for both VC-1 (MPEG-LA) and ASF (Microsoft) implementations, but that's that huge legal gray area where reverse engineering is difficult do distinguish from spec based implementations - and those formats certainly aren't the only ones implemented in FFmpeg/Libavcodec in that way. So I suppose one could say it's as (il)legal of a solution as is it is for certain other formats that FFmpeg/Libavcodec handle. :)

[Sharktooth]

...depending on the local country laws... coz the rest of the world is quite a different thing from the USA...

[disgust]

why then do so many sites use the sorenson codecs when vp6 is definitely superior in terms of compression?

[benwaggoner]

why then do so many sites use the sorenson codecs when vp6 is definitely superior in terms of compression?
VP6 is very slow (single threaded only) and very expensive (in the four figures per node for enterprise encoding).