Apple Thoughts: H.264 to Remain Royalty Free After 2016

"MPEG LA, the group that oversees licensing for a number of Internet media standards, today announced that Internet broadcast content using the H.264 video coding standard will remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license, quashing fears that the standard could suddenly become subject to royalty payments in 2016 after the current licensing term expires and is required to be renewed"

I'm sure this just about puts the nail in the coffin for HTML5 standardizing around an encoding scheme other than H.264. There's no reason not to use it. It's a codec that is supported by the major hardware makers, and browsers that support HTML5 all seem to have H.264 support. While I'd prefer an open source codec, a freely available codec is the next best alternative.