Such as?
> I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that part getting overlooked somehow?
"Better" doesn't mean "much better"; a better residual coder is useful, but H.264 has better reference frame system - On2 seems to love idiosyncratic systems which aren't as good - and much more flexible adaptive quantization. Which is the basis of x264's psy optimizations, so the same (fundamentally good) ideas probably can't be implemented as well.
> It's only a matter of time and at least the Xiph guys have experience of doing exactly this on a similar codebase and they've been working on VP8 for weeks already.
IIRC Theora barely implemented rate-distortion optimizations in the first place, let alone Psy-RD - you have to get that out of the way before you can do the really interesting things. However, I don't think VP8 uses the weird Hilbert coding of the older system, so it might be easier to implement all of that. Besides, you can just copy it from x264.
I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that part getting overlooked somehow?
To reiterate, if you only want to create one file for all your web viewers then H.264 baseline is your best option, and VP8 beats that.
Another general theme is that it's very similar to H.264. If you put your armchair patent lawyer hat to one side for a moment, isn't "similar to H.264" a really good thing to say about a codec? Personally I think it's good for H.264 to be knocked off its pedestal. Just because Steve Jobs mentioned it in a keynote it seems to have attained the same mystical halo that surrounded PPC, Altivec, AAC or Firewire, untouchable by mere mortals with their X86, MMX, MP3 and USB2 when really they're all just fairly standard technologies with pros and cons and susceptible to external market forces like any other tech.
All the flaws he finds are unquantified in their impact, much like the recent attack piece on Ogg by his colleague where fatal flaws were later revealed to save 7-bits per media file or be 0.1% less efficient than MP4. Maybe they are real problems that annoy software encoder purists, design flaws or actual bugs that can't even be fixed until a spec revision but do you actually care as a customer? (Again was H.264 handed down from God or is it just a committee written spec like most other technologies. Are we claiming it perfect or flawless just because it's the incumbent?)
About the only one that he quantifies is lack of B-frames. (Actually left out because of patents, yet this still gets criticized by someone who thinks they're also careless about patents) But B-frames have costs as well as benefits, something clearly shown by the fact that they were left out of H.264 baseline as well. If they're all sunshine and lollipops then why leave them out? Like many things in codecs and software generally, it's a tradeoff, more decode power for extra compression which may make sense on a destkop but not a laptop or mobile device.
Finally, note how often in this (and his preview article) he says VP8 will not be a serious challenger unless(!) they adopt psy optimizations that make x264 so much better than the other H.264 implementations. You'd think this was either impossible, or unthinkable, but it's not. It's only a matter of time and at least the Xiph guys have experience of doing exactly this on a similar codebase and they've been working on VP8 for weeks already.