I'm not sure what I think of H.264/WebM; I just want a good high-quality standard. The royalty questions has been a thorn so far; if it goes away for free content, good. There are all sorts of issues in this, like where does it leave ad-supported sites like Youtube? Or more importantly smaller ad-supported sites. We want our free porn after all! :P
Personally I'd like to see the better format win which is freely available. From what I gather, the better format is clearly H264, which has traction in the marketplace and hardware. Whether WebM can get traction at large remains to be seen; Google will no doubt use YouTube and Android as a vehicle to push it. Just as they push straight H264 to iPhones, might they not push WebM to all Android phones? Well, assuming manufacturers can get hardware-accelerated decoding, which won't be for some time, so maybe not yet... in the meantime, H264 has the upper hand in hardware including all mobile devices.
And then of course there are those pesky patents... the debate over software patents will have to resolve those, but one of the lead developers on the X264 project was quite clear on his belief that WebM is infringing in a number of key areas which there are no way around, despite various cludges to do so in other ways, meaning it has to use more inefficient means. Scrap software patents, and the problem goes away, but until then, it does seem WebM is encumbered.
There are plenty of free content creation tools like ones using X264 (eg Handbrake) for it not to matter to most people.
For me, Free Beer is good enough, never mind the ideology.
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