There’s been a lot of noise recently about Google Chrome shipping with H.264 decoder support. They’re actually using FFmpeg for this and a few other things. <disclaimer>These comments on my blog do not necessarily represent the views of all FFmpeg project members.</disclaimer> Personally, I’m glad they’re shipping with H.264 support.
Theora was obsolete when it was published and its authors (Monty from Xiph) agreed with this. The encoder implementations are crap, though getting better and, the most annoying noise for me coming from the outside world is that Theora is as good as or better than H.264. Theora is NOT as good as or better than H.264! Specification-wise, Theora cannot compete with H.264. Implementation-wise, in terms of FOSS, Theora (current or Thusnelda) does not compete with x264. There are no non-FOSS Theora implementations and x264 is one of the best H.264 encoders in the world and has few rivals.
I’m all for digital media that is free (in all senses) to create, distribute and consume. I don’t think Theora is the answer.