Firefox Closer to Supporting Open-source Video Codec

I'm not a video expert, but why aren't we focusing on the h.264 standard?

We will start to see h.264 decoding chipsets ("anytime now") so we can watch 1080p, why revert to a standard that makes it an additional transcoding step and not supported in hardware?

We were fairly discouraged when the w3c took the Ogg codecs out of the HTML 5 drafts. I'm very happy to see the browsers are supporting them anyway.

Monty is hard at work rewriting the theora encoder we originally ported from On2. If the leaps and bounds we made with Vorbis are any indication, I think Theora is going to see significant quality and speed improvements.

Those HTML 5 drafts shouldn't have had in the first place ANY specification of a particular video codec, open or closed source - that would be restrictive.

Requiring a baseline open source codec wouldn't be very restrictive, any more so than the way standards set other requirements for wide interoperability.

According to the vorbis and theora FAQs, vorbis is public domain and theora is BSD licensed. This is far from restrictive.

What chance is there that other mainstream browsers are going to support this codec? It's great for Firefox to get out in front, but when will IE and Safari follow?