One of the weird parts of this is just how damn good x264 is. I have a bunch of videos on my website, and because I'm some kind of basement-dwelling cretin, I manually encode them with FFmpeg to MPEG-4 and WebM.

Encoding to MPEG-4: Easy, fast, high-quality.

Encoding to WebM: Much slower to encode, requires tweaking the parameters, video usually looks noticeably worse at similar bit rates.

I don't know how much of this is caused by the encoder, how much is caused by the codec, and how much is caused by poor selection of parameters on my part. I use "recommended settings" that I find online and H.254/HiP.