>>38
It's not just Flash. The combination you just mentioned will work out of the box on any of:
* Windows 7
* Mac OS X (any recent version)
* Safari's <video> support (it uses QuickTime, see previous point)
* All decent media players (MPlayer, MPC-HC) and some that aren't (VLC)
* Nero Digital (both hardware devices and the codecs they install along with Nero)
* DivX 7 (see "Nero Digital", albeit these are using MKV instead of MP4, but I don't think any hardware will ship without MP4 support)
* Infinity of handheld devices (iPhone, iPod, iShit, modern phones, PSP, modern portable media players...)
* Your fucking video card, if it's actually a video card (not from Intel) and has been made in the last few years
* Your fucking video card, even if it's trash (from Intel) as long as it has been made in the last few months
* A plugin that is already running in your browser (Flash or the sodding QuickTime shit)
Good luck fighting that!
Also it's my understanding software targeting W7 or OSX can use the OS decoders for free, in all the senses of the word.
I'm glad this has been adopted as the new de-facto standard: it also happens to offer the best compression/quality ratio available today, as well as many extremely high quality implementations. It's hard to ask for more, and it's a rare occasion where the very best has won.