I want to meet the people encoding to MPEG-4 Part II and punch them in the junk. After their checks clear, I mean.

Good to see H.264 being mainstream :) Just wondering who needs VP6 output?

Honestly, I think the main reason is inertia. Some of our customers started using VP6 back in 2007-2008, and don't want to simultaneously support two codecs. They generally want to switch down the road, but it will take a bit of work to re-encode their backlog.

Licensing is the other issue: VP6 is royalty-free, while H.264 isn't.

Those needing flash video with alpha. Flash player 9(.115, I think), supports h.264, but not with alpha channels.

Good info, similarly the Unity 3D Web Player stats gives an insight into hardware and video specs: http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hardware-stats.html

Great for gauging hardware of the casual (web) gamer. Sadly, lots of Intel 945's still out there...

Sadly?

Lots of the Intel cards are low bar OEM, have little video memory and only really support fixed function pipelines rather than shader models. So you can't make stuff look as good and the bottom end of the market dictates how much stuff you can do 'mainstream'. Meaning lots of cards can't handle shaders which improve rendering quality immensely and put it on the GPU.

That's creepy. If you make a post here at HN it will get fetched and displayed on linked site too.