"if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees."
Clearly, the likes of Youtube and Vimeo don't care about this. They do seem to care about using a codec that is standard, widely supported and with good and varied implementations (both encoding and decoding, with or without hardware acceleration). Theora has neither of these characteristics.
"Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box."
Well, WinXP and Linux do not support Flash out of the box, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.
Clearly, the likes of Youtube and Vimeo don't care about this. They do seem to care about using a codec that is standard, widely supported and with good and varied implementations (both encoding and decoding, with or without hardware acceleration). Theora has neither of these characteristics.
"Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box."
Well, WinXP and Linux do not support Flash out of the box, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.