I've been trying to refrain from commenting, too, so that's one thing that we have... had in common.

> ...of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be supporting it in the near future...

First of all, including Opera in the list of those in favor of WebM is a lot like including Iceland in the Coalition of the Willing. If you live in Iceland, you probably overestimate Iceland's importance, but it undermines the intent of making a list in the first place. The flip side of this is that, while Internet Explorer probably won't support WebM unless Google indemnifies adopters, IE is almost as irrelevant as Opera in the arenas of both web video and The Future. Here's where we really are:

* Apple likes H.264 for the following reasons:
* The licensing and liability is known, and Apple can afford to pay. They don't care if web video ends up being a high stakes poker table, because they're a high roller.
* H.264-encoded video looks better than WebM video and takes up slightly less space.
* Most current graphics silicon supports hardware decoding of H.264, which allows for video playback that is both gorgeous and economical.
* Mozilla liked Theora because they can't or won't pay to license H.264, and Theora was the only open source candidate they could find to run in the election. Free is more important than good.
* Google likes WebM for the following reasons:
* They can control its development.
* It is, so far as anyone knows, unencumbered by patents, so no licensing.

I say "so far as anyone knows" because that's what Google is saying by not indemnifying WebM adopters. If you're worried about a theoretical MPEG-LA licensing gotcha, then you have to be equally worried that, if/when WebM adoption is significant, patent trolls won't show up with claims of infringement. At least with H.264, the licensing terms have been stated. YOU personally may not be worried about either scenario, but you're probably not weighing whether you should produce graphics chips that decode WebM. Does anybody on this forum want to argue whether the chipmakers who've pledged to do WebM decoding aren't nervously watching to see if more Android hardware makers get sued? By not indemnifying adopters, Google is essentially picking an open source fight in a crowded bar and then ducking out the side door.

>The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how much you want it to.

That is a very big component to the complaining: I can't watch your idealism on my iPad for the duration of a 6-hour flight. And you're right, the world does not revolve around iOS, but the video world does revolve around H.264 right now. If you're not shooting with actual film, then your video workflow literally starts and ends with H.264.

And maybe more to the point web video does revolve around iOS devices, because iOS users watch orders of magnitude more video than anybody else.

> WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality

If by "features" you're excluding fast, economical encoding and decoding and by "quality" you're excluding picture quality. "Roughly equivalent" is just weaseling around admitting H.264 looks and works better. Someday... who knows? Someday GM might make a better car than Toyota, but for now, GM is stuck saying things like "[our] quality can't be beat by Toyota."

> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.

And the hipster-fanboys doing the pointless whining harbor deep suspicions that people who are willing to trade their audio and video playback quality today for the open source promise of adequate video someday don't really care much about audio or video.