One of the original H.264 proposals was to make Baseline Profile royalty-free -- unfortunately this kind of died (I don't know the details). The goal of making

One of the original H.264 proposals was to make Baseline Profile royalty-free -- unfortunately this kind of died (I don't know the details). The goal of making a royalty-free standard predates Theora by at least 5-10 years. Theora is an amalgamation of (mostly) MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and JPEG.