Originally posted by monraaf
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Anyone who thought VP8 was going to outperform h264 was misled, anyway. That was never realistic. The point was to get something good enough for actual use on the web. The fact that Hulu, for example, already uses VP6 at certain resolutions makes the old "everything besides h264 isn't good enough" argument bunk. If VP8 can just outperform h264 baseline, (and it appears it probably can), then that's good enough for the web. h264 is more important for things like blu-ray where absolute quality matters so much more.
It sounds to me like a lot of the oddities that x264 developer pointed out are probably left out for patent reasons. Someone commented there that it's probably better for On2 to base their work on h264 so they know exactly which patents apply, and then they can work around them one by one by small changes that invalidate each of them. Doing something a little more original, ironically, would leave them more open to submarine patent threats.
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