Free Software Types are Banging the Theora Drum, Hopelessly

Umm... buggy H.264 in Linux? Come again? H.264 playback using Open Source software is not buggy. Far from it. Whether VLC on Linux or MPC on Windows - it works extremely well.<p>In-browser H.264, maybe, but that's has nothing to do with the quality of open source H.264 decoding. Maybe a plugin problem, and likely a temporary one at that.<p>I use open-source codecs to watch H.264 all the time. I have watched hundreds of hours of it on Linux-driven devices without a problem. This article is nothing but FUD itself.<p>And if you want to talk about the quality of H.264 encoding, I'll put x264 up against any commercial product any day, period. It beats the hell out of everything I have seen.

So in other words, sit back and relax while we wait for VP8.

I have a question - I am a linux user and am willing to pay a few dollars to get a patent-encumbered, high quality decoder - if it allows me to watch high def entertainment with low enough internet bandwidth expenditure.<p>Is it that a vast majority of Linux users are unwilling to _pay_ : for content and software ?<p>If it is as I suspect, then it could easily sound a death knell for media consumption on Linux. I wonder how much sooner would we have had Linux hardware-assisted H.264 playback (ffmpeg, vlc), if there money to be made off them.<p>H.264 is evil for content producers - for content consumers, if (and _only_ if) the quality of H.264 &#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62; Theora, then I can see why we would have to pay for it.

Isn't H.264 the core of Quicktime? Isn't it obvious that Jobs is just pissed off that Quicktime lost out to Flash as a web video standard? I remember when Flash was for interactive stuff and Quicktime was for anything video.<p>This is just a second wave of attack for Jobs cause the first one failed.