Yes and yes. Extremely easy all around. Also extremely easy on Mac and Windows. Double-click an installer, and then run the app. Check it out for yourself. Goog

Yes and yes. Extremely easy all around. Also extremely easy on Mac and Windows. Double-click an installer, and then run the app. Check it out for yourself. Google VLC for Windows or Mac. Or the K-Lite Codec Pack for Windows which comes bundled with Media Player Classic - full open source high-quality high-speed H.264 playback. To say the fight is over may be true for Theora. That is a losing battle because, despite its promise, Theora just can't match the quality and efficiency of H.264. But again, you are mixing two things together if you think that the death of Theora is the death of open source video encoding and decoding. VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything. EDIT: Correction: No they haven't yet, but multiple sources report that they will at I/O. My bad.