[ZeroGravitas]

I'll state up front I think that patent-royalty free codecs are the future, and that Theora is the best of that class at the moment.

But codec comparison is a complicated subject. That link isn't H.264 vs. Theora, it's the particular H.264 encoder and particular settings used at that time by Youtube versus some similar bitrate Theora. It was prompted by an ill-informed comments by Google's Open Source dude who basically said that Youtube using Theora would melt the internet. The test only shows that Theora isn't a ridiculous choice for most web video, not that it's better or even as good as H.264 in general.

The idea is that open trumps closed over time. That's why we're using linux on our servers, and web technologies on top. These were (and are in some cases) toys compared with the competition, but got better by being open. It's only a matter of time till video codecs go the same way, supporting Theora will speed this up and we'll all benefit.