As far as I'm aware:

- Apple support standard MPEG4 formats at the moment - Flash was not a standard, and - Apple don\t currently ship proprietary video or audio codecs.

Let's face it - Vorbis solved a problem that theoretically existed, but had minimal practical impact. The same applies to modern video codecs.

When the Ogg formats have provided genuine utility they are used (see e.g. Speex in Siri and Google products) - and what would be really nice would be a free-as-in-patents, hardware-supported, high-performance video codec which can be implemented by all major vendors. Maybe it'll turn out that way.

The problem is just that unless the US dumps their patent system, no one has any incentive to use FOSS codecs.

Hardware/SoC providers will focus on the "licensed" stuff because buying a license will protect you from IP lawsuits, and the content providers will also use the "licensed" codecs because the support is far more widespread (and well, for mobile you need HW acceleration if you don't mind burning through the battery for a 2-minute cat video).

Long story short, as a manager of a company selling mobile handhelds, I would not give a dime about the "open" codecs because the risk of stepping on a patent mine is too high.

My palm T5 could play software decoded h.263 video just fine. I watched entire movies on it. Battery technology has only improved since then.

My current android phone can sw decode h.264 for many hours with no problems (Now games are another matter. 1 hour of PvZ and it wants me to plug it in).

Both vorbis and flac are open codecs and are supported in a wide range of devices, like every Android device for starters, same goes for webm which is also open source and royalty free.

However, hardware support for WebM is very thin on the ground; the Tegra 4 is the only mainstream shipping SoC to have it, and the Tegra 4 isn't _that_ mainstream. That Android support uses the CPU, and thus hits the battery and performs poorly on older devices.