What's the current state of the H.264/Theora debate?

[nottrobin]

Open video is the most talked about contribution that HTML5 brings to the web.

I know that due to squabbles between the big players, codec requirements have been dropped from the specification. But all the individual browsers are still implementing their preferred codecs within the browser.

It seems to me that it's not what the different browsers decide to support which will decide the future for open video, but instead it's what the big websites decide to support. Surely the majority of all the video watched in the world must be on YouTube. So the real question is can the YouTube team at Google be persuaded to support Ogg Theora format video.

Google obviously have sympathies towards the non-proprietary Ogg Theora format, their complaint being that it's not good enough quality. Which led them to implement their HTML5 test page in H.264 only.

However, Google's claim that converting their videos to Theora format is infeasible has been challenged, and especially since Mozilla is supporting the continued development of the Theora format, which has been improving considerably (I'm pretty sure a new version of Theora was released recently, but I can't find a link for it).

So my question is, since all my sources on this are at least a couple of months old, does anyone know what the latest news is? Is there any sign at all that Google and YouTube are taking on board these arguments and rethinking their position?

Cheers,
Robin.

[nottrobin]

Sorry, here's a link to the YouTube HTML5 test page I mentioned:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

And by this sentence:

"Google obviously have sympathies towards the non-proprietary Ogg Theora format, their complaint being that it's not good enough quality. Which led them to implement their HTML5 test page in H.264 only."

I was referring to Hickson's statement that:

"Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube."

[nottrobin]

Link to new Theora version:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/theora-1-1-released/

Anyone know if Google has a response to this?