Published at LXer:

Whether we like it or not, H.264 is "the" de-facto standard on the Internet. Every time you visit Youtube, you are watching a video encoded using the H.264 standard. The video quality is great, the compression is astonishing. And so is the price. H.264 is subject to a huge number of software patents. You need to pay hefty licensing fees if you want to create H.264 files today. We, the users, are not feeling this as we are not paying a cent. However, the freedomes allowed by this format are limited, and vague at best: here is why.

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It's true that this may be a problem in 2015.

The safest codec to use is theora ... but it's not that good in terms of quality and compression from what I see. It's also not 100% safe from patents, and webm is not at all safe. From analyses that I've read, it "borrows" a lot of patented code from h264 and others.

The problem, however, is not the codecs themselves, it's the software patents on those codecs. Software patents must go, not h264.