Every time you license H.264 (or something other from MPEG-4 pool), a cut goes to Apple (also to Microsoft and Nokia).
Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora.
For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.
Furthermore, it's not clear what Apple would stand to gain by enforcing its two patents that may or may not be relevant to Theora. Maybe I'm wrong, but media patent enforcement doesn't seem to be one of Apple's core businesses (HTC lawsuit notwithstanding). There are plenty of other companies, though, that likely have a vested interest in protecting their much-larger video patent portfolios.
I think it would be wrong to assume at this point that Apple is instigating patent litigation against Theora. Occam's razor would encourage the view that Apple knows the people who want to take down Theora and is rationally fearful of them.
H.264 can be encoded, using the same tools, in a way that can, or cannot, be hardware decoded.
I believe Jobs is talking about comparing two videos on the iPhone, with hardware accelerated video lasting 10 hours and non-accelerated video lasting 5 hours. You may not notice if you're not paying attention to battery while you watch video.
To the sibling comment here, I'm not referring to profiles. I'm referring to the fact that various implementations of H.264 encoders produce content that, depending on the implementation, may or may not be accelerated by the iPhone's PowerVR SGX 535.
One can produce a pair of H.264 encoded in .mp4 container movies, encoded from the same mpeg2ts original, one of which can use hardware acceleration, and the other of which cannot.
(I haven't had the chance to check yet if Adobe's 'Gala' responds the same way to such files on the desktop Macs Gala supports.)
iPhone (and Android phones) can decode only certain profiles (Baseline), and up to certain levels (depending on resolution). Even hardware assisted decoding with PC graphics cards can accelerate only up to certain level (usually [email protected], but some nvidias can decode high@5).
The rest is more complex than hardware assisted decoders are able to decode and pure software codec has to be used.
Or just try playing high@ video on iphone.
I copied this [email protected] file out of my iTunes library and it successfully syncs to my 3GS.
I can't get it to play over Wifi, while I can get a [email protected] file to play, but I think this has something to do with not enforcing some bitrate limit rather than the profile.
Search for "Baseline Profile" on this page for the full details:
Did you mean MPEG-4 Part 2 (Advanced Simple Profile)?
Now, just because you create something doesn't mean it doesn't infringe on someone's patent (read: it could infringe a patent). However, google presumably did some serious due-diligence before forking over their measly $133M, especially on the patent position. That doesn't make mean they're right, but it does mean that they think the patent position is pretty strong. Of course, they would have focused on VP8, the one they bought, not Theora's VP3 (and which might infringe due to subsequent open-source additions.)
Google might open source VP8 on May 19-20 http://www.reelseo.com/html5-vp8-google/
Ballsy move.
Edit: in reply to a "tweet" of mine, he posted the headers:
It's really hard to believe they'd be such arrogant jerks as to go after something open source like that.
So this is excellent news for Theora, as it could be an end to the "submarine patent" FUD.
Maybe they'll be a part of it and maybe they won't, but it doesn't sound like they're big players in the video patent space.
That's kind of scary.