I’ve already covered how to convert CamTasia 6 mp4 screencasts to flv, what concerns me is the availability of mp4-enabled players.  Do enough users have an mp4-compatible player?  If not, how many see nothing when presented with an mp4 screencast?  I’ve raised this question in the TechSmith forums.

Troy Stein, CamTasia’s Product Manager, provided some explanation but didn’t offer solutions.

“When we saw the results of MPEG4 output in our early CS 6 development work, we knew that FLV had a short shelf life. The MPEG4 files have better quality, often smaller file sizes, better playback on portable devices and produce faster than FLVs”

Currently over 98% of installed Flash players support Flash 7 and the FLV format (source: Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration, updated September 2008).  The same statistics show support for MP4 (via Flash Player v9.0.115 or better) is  limited to 89% of installed players.

This means that 11% of visitors cannot view MP4 content vs 2% of visitors who cannot view FLV content, as counted by Adobe.  The MP4-compatible version of Flash was released in 2007 (zdnet) and had over 80% penetration by July 2008.

Since Adobe’s statistics were recorded in September 2008 I wanted to see whether the results still held true now in January 2009.

I verified these statistics against real-world sites using December’s visitor count – I checked ShowMeDo.com (large screencast-based video education site, I’m a co-founder), IanOzsvald.com (my own blog, tech-savvy readers) and ProCasts.co.uk (this site) using the installed Google Analytics.

Monthly visitor counts are:

• ShowMeDo.com 100,000 (3 years+)
• IanOzsvald.com 1,500 (3 years+)
• ProCasts.co.uk 300 (6 months)

Counting the percentage of visitors who have Flash Player 9.0.115 or better we see:

• ShowMeDo.com 86%
• IanOzsvald.com 84%
• ProCasts.co.uk 96%

Using real-world sites that focus on a Western (US+European) tech-savvy audience we see that 85% of the majority of these visitors can see MP4-enabled content.  The other 15% probably can’t view the MP4 videos – they just see a link to the raw file or an error in Flash.  I’ll wager that many tech-focused sites see similar statistics – over 80% penetration but less than 90%.  If the tech-focused sites see less than 90%, how much worse does it get for general-folk-focused sites?

Possibly we follow jimb’s solution and support two versions of the video simultaneously.  Alternatively we export using mp4 and convert to flv until these percentages improve.

Perhaps someone else has an alternative solution?