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The post the parent linked to goes into extensive detail about the technical aspects of the codec, has a real world comparison, a proper one, and is overall an excellent article. In contrast, the article you linked to uses poor quality source videos, JPEG for their comparison images, and by their own admission didn't even manage to use the same frame for both codecs in the images, among other problems. If you're calling that a "real article", you are in no position to be calling someone else a troll.

And enough of these fucking asinine claims about the x264 developers being out to get your poor, precious VP8 that crop up every time someone posts that link. They don't work for MPEG. They don't make obscene mounts of money off of all the people using their free (as in both sense of the word) open source software. They're not secret Chinese agents working to destroy the West from within through the patent system. There is absolutely no motive for them to lie about this sort of thing. VP8 is simply not as good of a codec, and no amount of baseless accusations will change this.

The post the parent linked to goes into extensive detail about the technical aspects of the codec, has a real world comparison, a proper one, and is overall an excellent article. In contrast, the article you linked to uses poor quality source videos, JPEG for their comparison images, and by their own admission didn't even manage to use the same frame for both codecs in the images, among other problems. If you're calling that a "real article", you are in no position to be calling someone else a troll.

And enough of these fucking asinine claims about the x264 developers being out to get your poor, precious VP8 that crop up every time someone posts that link. They don't work for MPEG. They don't make obscene mounts of money off of all the people using their free (as in both sense of the word) open source software. They're not secret Chinese agents working to destroy the West from within through the patent system. There is absolutely no motive for them to lie about this sort of thing. VP8 is simply not as good of a codec, and no amount of baseless accusations will change this.

The post the parent linked to goes into extensive detail about the technical aspects of the codec, has a real world comparison, a proper one, and is overall an excellent article. In contrast, the article you linked to uses poor quality source videos, JPEG for their comparison images, and by their own admission didn't even manage to use the same frame for both codecs in the images, among other problems. If you're calling that a "real article", you are in no position to be calling someone else a troll.

And enough of these fucking asinine claims about the x264 developers being out to get your poor, precious VP8 that crop up every time someone posts that link. They don't work for MPEG. They don't make obscene mounts of money off of all the people using their free (as in both sense of the word) open source software. They're not secret Chinese agents working to destroy the West from within through the patent system. There is absolutely no motive for them to lie about this sort of thing. VP8 is simply not as good of a codec, and no amount of baseless accusations will change this.

I'm not sure. VP3 is pretty old. I don't know enough about it (I'm not an expert). I'm not sure if VP3 is particularly useful or relevant. As far as I can tell, the only reason you might actually want to use it is because it is theoretically patent-free, but there's no guarantee of that. It's a pretty horrible codec. Compare these samples, which I've placed in order of quality:

Theora/VP3: http://doom10.org/compare/ptalabvorm.png
VP8: http://doom10.org/compare/vp8.png
MPEG-4 ASP/XviD: http://doom10.org/compare/xvid.png
H.264/x264: http://doom10.org/compare/x264.png

Unfortunately, Theora/VP3 can't even keep up with XviD. That people wanted browsers to adopt this for HTML5 instead of h.264 boggles my mind.

Ironically, shortly after being branded a troll for suggesting that VP8 was patent-encumbered, MPEG-LA has begun forming a patent-pool for VP8:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/21/133249

I'm not sure. VP3 is pretty old. I don't know enough about it (I'm not an expert). I'm not sure if VP3 is particularly useful or relevant. As far as I can tell, the only reason you might actually want to use it is because it is theoretically patent-free, but there's no guarantee of that. It's a pretty horrible codec. Compare these samples, which I've placed in order of quality:

Theora/VP3: http://doom10.org/compare/ptalabvorm.png
VP8: http://doom10.org/compare/vp8.png
MPEG-4 ASP/XviD: http://doom10.org/compare/xvid.png
H.264/x264: http://doom10.org/compare/x264.png

Unfortunately, Theora/VP3 can't even keep up with XviD. That people wanted browsers to adopt this for HTML5 instead of h.264 boggles my mind.

Ironically, shortly after being branded a troll for suggesting that VP8 was patent-encumbered, MPEG-LA has begun forming a patent-pool for VP8:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/21/133249

I'm not sure. VP3 is pretty old. I don't know enough about it (I'm not an expert). I'm not sure if VP3 is particularly useful or relevant. As far as I can tell, the only reason you might actually want to use it is because it is theoretically patent-free, but there's no guarantee of that. It's a pretty horrible codec. Compare these samples, which I've placed in order of quality:

Theora/VP3: http://doom10.org/compare/ptalabvorm.png
VP8: http://doom10.org/compare/vp8.png
MPEG-4 ASP/XviD: http://doom10.org/compare/xvid.png
H.264/x264: http://doom10.org/compare/x264.png

Unfortunately, Theora/VP3 can't even keep up with XviD. That people wanted browsers to adopt this for HTML5 instead of h.264 boggles my mind.

Ironically, shortly after being branded a troll for suggesting that VP8 was patent-encumbered, MPEG-LA has begun forming a patent-pool for VP8:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/21/133249

I'm not sure. VP3 is pretty old. I don't know enough about it (I'm not an expert). I'm not sure if VP3 is particularly useful or relevant. As far as I can tell, the only reason you might actually want to use it is because it is theoretically patent-free, but there's no guarantee of that. It's a pretty horrible codec. Compare these samples, which I've placed in order of quality:

Theora/VP3: http://doom10.org/compare/ptalabvorm.png
VP8: http://doom10.org/compare/vp8.png
MPEG-4 ASP/XviD: http://doom10.org/compare/xvid.png
H.264/x264: http://doom10.org/compare/x264.png

Unfortunately, Theora/VP3 can't even keep up with XviD. That people wanted browsers to adopt this for HTML5 instead of h.264 boggles my mind.

Ironically, shortly after being branded a troll for suggesting that VP8 was patent-encumbered, MPEG-LA has begun forming a patent-pool for VP8:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/21/133249

You are right, and there is also the fact that Youtube used a really bad H.264 encoder back then. They have recently switched to x264, so while the SD clips are still encoded in baseline profile that should give them a little boost in quality.

All in all that comparison linked in the summary probably done more to hurt Theora than to help it, because it has given the codec a bad name in the video encoding community. One of the main developers of x264 recently posted about the comparison and Theora in general.
The part concerning Theora having the same quality as H.264:

On the other hand, the Theora devs themselves are strongly against any such claims. gmaxwell asked me to "bonk on the head" anyone who claimed that Theora was nearly as good, as good, or better than H.264, because such claims not only create unreasonable expectations that the devs cannot possibly live up to, but also create the impression that "Theora supporters are liars", which is obviously rather counterproductive to what they are trying to do.

That a free codec like Theora exists is good, and it is estimated that Theora can be competitive with or even a bit better than XviD (MPEG4 ASP) when it is more developed and adaptive quantization (in version 1.2) and other psy optimizations are implemented, but currently the encoder has some problems that need to be addressed. The current Theora encoder is relatively slow. It should be much faster than x264 because of the simpler format, but it currently only has a rather small speed advantage (using the defaults on both encoders; same bitrate) on a single core CPU and it doesn't support multithreading while x264 scales almost linearly with the number of cores. Then there is the fact that the current Theora encoder is dropping frames in 1-pass and 2-pass mode which is unfortunate considering how long the format has been in development.

There are a couple of comparisons between x264 and Theora 1.1 and currently it looks like an up to date x264 revision can give better quality than Theora at half the bitrate with slightly slower (single core CPU) or much faster (multi core CPU) encoding speed using the default settings in both encoders.
Videos; current Theora and old x264 (pre MB-Tree)
Metrics ; on animated content
Screenshots; TV capture and video game footage

CoreAVC doesn't cheat by lowering quality. The output of a compliant H.264 decoder has to be bit exact in every mode, not just lossless. CoreAVC also uses hardware decoding in newer nvidia cards and there it couldn't cheat even if it wanted to.
Most of the time when people have problems with the look of AVC videos it's a renderer issue that makes the colours look washed out, but that's not really the decoders problem and can easily be fixed. Another popular problem is people turning deblocking off on the decoder because they think it is optional. Most H.264 decoders provide such an option to speed up decoding if you have no other way to play the video smoothly, but that can cause serious artifacts like blocking and colour drifts that get progressively worse throughout the GOP. Also on doom9 you sometimes get people who claim 2 screenshots show differences between decoders while when you compare them bit for bit they are the same. Just goes to show that if you really want to see a difference you'll see it whether it's there or not.
CoreAVC also doesn't decode video much faster than other (free) AVC decoders these days. ffmpeg came a lot closer to its performance and there is also the DivX AVC decoder and DiAVC which offer comparable performance.

While we are at the topic of video and H.264: Theora is not in the same league as H.264 and claiming so doesn't do it any good. In fact the Theora developers discourage such claims.