I already started talking about this here: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/155489.html

but i believe this is expanding as the current, single-video, HTML 5 demo on YouTube uses MP4, and there is now a new "Download MP4" button on each of my uploads (which use Ogg Theora/Vorbis or-- yuck-- MTS) on my YouTube "My Videos" page.

If YouTube decides to use MP4 instead of Ogg for HTML 5, i will be very very disappointed, but it seems like that is what is happening. This also could mean that video downloads will be made widely available. Either way, for those who care about this, please ask YT for Ogg in their HTML 5 demo: http://pinstack.blogspot.com/2009/06/hey-youtube-we-want-open-video.html

I will support you on this, Open standard are created with good intentions and are there for a reason. Why license MP4? Of course, Ogg formats may confuse users who have never used it before, but this would encourage other vendors such as Apple with iTunes and the iPod to support the format and other browsers like Opera and Safari too. As you said in your blog post " Theora is ahead of H.264 in objective quality"

I think the choice is definately needed.

Ogg Theora shouldn't confuse anyone because i'm just talking about using it for HTML 5's Open Web Video (meaning that it will be embedded). For downloads they can offer MP4 in addition to Ogg.

Chris DiBona of Google made a remarkable claim on the WhatWG mailing list: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet."

wrong, wrong, wrong.

http://www.reddit.com/tb/8scz7 (http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html)