And, “you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the tag” becomes “you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the VIDEO tag”

Ogg is not the “audio part”. Ogg is a container format that is relatively unrelated to either the video or the audio. Vorbis is the open source audio codec typically used in an Ogg container, and Theora is the video codec used in an Ogg container. There are other codecs that Ogg will eventually support, the most notable being BBC’s open source Dirac.

Similarly, MP4 is a container format that usually holds either H.264 (video codec) or AAC (audio codec) amongst others.

Also, regarding: “You pretty much need to be a code warrior to even use it.” It doesn’t take much of a code warrior to put into a page.

It’s also interesting to note that all of the other “big 3″ video players you mentioned are or will soon be supporting H.264. Flash can already play H.264 MP4 files, as can Quicktime. H.264 support is also being built into Windows 7. H.264 is also built into Bluray, iPhone, ZuneHD, Tivo, etc., and Youtube has the majority (if not all) of their content already encoded into H.264 (how do you think that Youtube videos play on hardware devices such as the iPhone and Tivo).

Because of this, for browsers that support H.264 in their implementation (Safari, Chrome), you can embed the SAME mp4 file in the tag, and as a fallback easily load it into a Flash player for users of Internet Explorer. If you were to embed Theora, you’d either have to encode the video in two formats or load the video into the browser through a Java applet as fallback. Neither of those sound very appealing.

There comes the rub: Theora may be approaching the same ballpark when it comes to quality and it may be free, but how do you compete with superior quality and the ubiquity of H.264? H.264 IS already the standard… it’s just unfortunate that it must be licensed.