Video encoder comparison

There has been some buzz about HTML5 web video lately. I won’t retell the story here, because it’s almost completely political and not technical, while I’m only interested in the technical side of things. One thing that struck me, though, is that many people believe that the two contenders, H.264 and Ogg Theora, are comparative in quality and performance. As someone who implements video codecs for a living, this struck me as quite odd: How can a refined version of an old and crippled MPEG-4 derivate come anywhere close to a format that incorporates (almost) all of the the latest and greatest of video compression research? I decided to give it a try and compare H.264, Theora and a few other codecs myself.
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