"Washed out" is not a fault of H.264 per se, but video decoders being awful at color management. Most common errors are lack of gamma correction for Rec 709 and

"Washed out" is not a fault of H.264 per se, but video decoders being awful at color management. Most common errors are lack of gamma correction for Rec 709 and assuming that less-than-HD videos are in ill-defined BT 601 color space. There's also a lesser problem of chroma subsampling destroying fine saturated details. WebM/VP9 supports full-res chroma.