VP8, VP9, and AV1 are all wonderful and unencumbered. However, as awful as the licensing of H.264 is, it does yield reasonable quality even on hardware that is

VP8, VP9, and AV1 are all wonderful and unencumbered. However, as awful as the licensing of H.264 is, it does yield reasonable quality even on hardware that is over a decade old. It is true that for many purposes we can offload encoding onto servers. However, as someone that frequently deals with live video streaming, AV1 is still out of reach on most hardware I am on and VP9 has only been viable for less than a decade. Yes, VP9 and AV1 are superior in terms of quality, but it is truly remarkable that H.264 runs as well as it does and I wish we had a similar unencumbered lightweight/portable codec (VP8 in my experience is about as heavy as VP9 and offers about the same quality as H.264). At least for audio we now have Opus and Flac (plus MP3 having had its vile patents expire), so hopefully video is the last frontier and VP9 and AV1 will become the standard over this decade.