I wish I could upvote you a dozen times. This exactly expresses my own feelings about DF. Every time he goes off on one of these snarky tirades I resolve to u

I wish I could upvote you a dozen times. This exactly expresses my own feelings about DF. Every time he goes off on one of these snarky tirades I resolve to unsubscribe in my RSS feeder. He usually then redeems himself with an insightful, technically clueful run. The most irritating thing about the h264 rant is that there are some valid points in there: content producers would have to encode content twice, lack of hardware decoding, pushing video back to Flash, proprietary nature of VP8's development. But these all seem like short-term problems to me. Hardware decoding will happen and Flash will support WebM. The biggest long-term sticking issue to me is Apple. They have a lot of weight to throw around with iPhones and iPads, and it seems h264 is unavoidable there. Google could throw its own weight around by switching all of YouTube to WebM, but that would take some time as hardware and software catch up. In the meanwhile, Apple is selling millions upon millions of h264-only iOS devices. And there's the patent issue too. It'd be nice of Google indemnified WebM, but they also have enough patents that they could cause problems for MPEG-LA too.