I have no plans to ever program video encoders or decoders, but this blog is always fascinating reading, and satisfies a lot of the curiosity I and, I assume, others have regarding just how video compression really works. (It’s not as straightforward as GIF or JPEG, that’s for sure!)
This is exactly why I think it's crazy for browsers to be forcing users to use the codecs that they embed in their program, rather than letting the user use their own codecs. It's fine to bundle codecs so you know the user can watch things, but when I have a better codec installed on my system - I should be able to use it.