It's not clear whether VP8 is patent-free, and it has other issues. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 Addend

It's not clear whether VP8 is patent-free, and it has other issues. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 Addendum C: Summary for the lazy VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. It’s not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved. VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsoft’s VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot. VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpeg’s H.264. This probably can’t be improved that much; VP8 as a whole is similar in complexity to H.264. With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn’t mean that it’s sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn’t, I would be cautious. VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it’s a big upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats. VP8 is not ready for prime-time; the spec is a pile of copy-pasted C code and the encoder’s interface is lacking in features and buggy. They aren’t even ready to finalize the bitstream format, let alone switch the world over to VP8. With the lack of a real spec, the VP8 software basically is the spec–and with the spec being “final”, any bugs are now set in stone. Such bugs have already been found and Google has rejected fixes. Google made the right decision to pick Matroska and Vorbis for its HTML5 video proposal.