I'll state up front I think that patent-royalty free codecs are the future, and that Theora is the best of that class at the moment.

But codec comparison is a complicated subject. That link isn't H.264 vs. Theora, it's the particular H.264 encoder and particular settings used at that time by Youtube versus some similar bitrate Theora. It was prompted by an ill-informed comments by Google's Open Source dude who basically said that Youtube using Theora would melt the internet. The test only shows that Theora isn't a ridiculous choice for most web video, not that it's better or even as good as H.264 in general.

The idea is that open trumps closed over time. That's why we're using linux on our servers, and web technologies on top. These were (and are in some cases) toys compared with the competition, but got better by being open. It's only a matter of time till video codecs go the same way, supporting Theora will speed this up and we'll all benefit.

Problem is not that Theora isn't capable enough now that MozCo has poured money on it. The problem is that Google and every other video service has already their videos in h264, which is playable in Flash. So if YouTube were to support Theora they'd need to re-encode all their videos, and store them as duplicates.

Another problem with Theora is hardware. There is a lot of hardware h264 encoders and decoders, allowing even cellphones to play HD h264. AFAIK there is absolute no Theora hardware currently.

Sounds like a chicken and egg problem to me. If we collectively ignore ogv because there are no current hardware en/decoders, then why should anyone build it? These things are built when enough demand is present. For that, the push from the Mozilla foundation seems to be reasonable. Once there is more demand, the tech comes automatically. If we clinge to H264, nobody will ever build the right hardware. It's basically a demand based resource allocation problem, and Firefox is doing the demand part. Seems reasonable to me.

Mozilla has not poured any money into Theora that I know of. The primary developers are all working on it in their spare time or as part of their jobs with other companies. For example, Monty is employed at RedHat.

The fact that Theora is competitive to the best proprietary codecs without any real funding is a huge success. Imagine what would happen if Google or Mozilla put a little effort behind that?

I'm not accusing greg of anything, however, I personally would feel a little uneasy trusting someone that works for one of the entities involved, to be making unbiased comparisons.

I'd distrust a comparison page hosted by an Apple employee for the same reason.

That was just the first comparison that I came around at it sounded reasonable. I would actually prefer if someone else would show more of these. But not a lot of folks do that. Everyone is just bitching around.

Also, maybe there are problems with theora, but then again, it's better to push it to more attention and fix the problems now than settle with a halfassed, non-sustainable solution and having the same discussion same time next year again. Seems to be very ineffective.