VP8 vs H.264

First, the conclusions for the lazy:

• VP8 is very similar to H.264, but it does not have better quality, nor is it faster.
• In the face of such striking similarities, the burden of proving VP8 being patent-free is still on Google.
• The VP8 spec is not complete or final in any way, so it might take time to integerate this codec into hardware devices.
• and lastly, having no hardware-accelerated support in existing smartphones/mobile-devices for decoding VP8 makes it very CPU and battery intensive.

One thing good about VP8: it does away with interlacing. Who needs it today, anyway? But VP8 lacks B-frames. What? B-frames can give 10-20% (or more) compression benefit for minimal speed cost.

References:

• The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8, by a third-year college student named Jason Garrett-Glaser, who works on the open source x264 project, a free software library for encoding video in H.264.
• Steve Jobs backed his claim than VP8 is not ready for prime time by the URL to Garrett-Glaser's blog post.
• VP8: a retrospective, another comment by Dark Shikari
  
• Moscow State University report on H.264 compared to other codecs.
• MSU Seventh MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison