H.264/Theora Debate Continues

Mozilla foundation announced a $100k grant to support the development of Theora (see VentureBeat). The basic idea is to improve Theora and make it more widely available as an alternative to non-free video codecs. I was at the W3C session on "Video on the Web" in December of 2007 and a heated discussion broke on the issue of standardizing the codec for web video. Stephan Wenger from Nokia recommended H.264 ( Nokia position paper) and this stirred the hornet's nest with an ensuing debate on patents (submarine or otherwise) and royalties. In a codec shootout by OSNews, H.264 won clearly over Theora in visual quality and H.264 is already the video codec of choice for Apple. Microsoft finally yielding to H.264 over its own VC-1 surely tells you something. Giving people a choice is always a good idea but in the end it is a winner takes all game and it looks like H.264 has already won.