I must confess I’m not in the video/audio business, and I don’t know 100% about the differences between Theora and H.264 and its licensing model.
But I do know about GIF and MP3, so it’s easy to choose a side in this topic: go for open source supported and royalty-free technology for the win!
There’s another point. My three years old laptop can hardly play a video in some of the flash players out there, and certainly it’s not able to play most of the HD videos. Flash on Fedora (eh, Linux) sucks and melts my CPU even with small ads.
With HTML5 and in-browser Theora support it’s different. The video in this post plays smooth and using about 30% of my CPU. Yes, it’s the way to go (or you can donate some bucks so I can buy a new laptop, dammit!).
I don’t get the point to buy a Quad Core laptop just to watch some videos on the Internet, do you?
