Slightly amused by the engineer worldview evident in the last line.
"psy optimizations are the single most critical feature ... they're the reason that Vorbis beat MP3 for audio"
So in other words, they're not the most critical feature since Vorbis quality and freedom didn't budge MP3 and so, if we imagine a parallel world where x264 does not exist and Google's VP8 was actually noticeably better than the best H.264 (like Vorbis vs MP3 or on par like Vorbis vs AAC) we would find that anti-competitive patent pools would still be forcing us to use their choice of codec.
The best we can reasonably hope for, as we saw with Vorbis, is for a strong competitor to prevent crazy licence fees. And maybe in time for H.265 the EU or China will have enough political clout and common-sense to demand that international video standards must be royalty free.
"psy optimizations are the single most critical feature ... they're the reason that Vorbis beat MP3 for audio"
So in other words, they're not the most critical feature since Vorbis quality and freedom didn't budge MP3 and so, if we imagine a parallel world where x264 does not exist and Google's VP8 was actually noticeably better than the best H.264 (like Vorbis vs MP3 or on par like Vorbis vs AAC) we would find that anti-competitive patent pools would still be forcing us to use their choice of codec.
The best we can reasonably hope for, as we saw with Vorbis, is for a strong competitor to prevent crazy licence fees. And maybe in time for H.265 the EU or China will have enough political clout and common-sense to demand that international video standards must be royalty free.