The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers, shipping hundreds of millions of embedded devices a year. Apple having a few patents in the pool just makes a janitorial-sized line-item in their budget even cheaper since they get payments back too. Apple has paid to license a suite of codecs for every install since the dawn of Quicktime (though they charged $20 for an MPEG2 encoder for a long time), supporting h.264 <video> costs them nothing — they already paid a nickel for your iTunes install.
Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world.
QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.
The patents are cheap now while H.264 is a candidate for adoption as the de-facto standard in HTML5 video. In a few years, once H.264 HTML5 video is ubiquitous, and no one can watch anything online without a H.264 decoder, licenses won't be so cheap.
It is pretty dangerous to allow H.264 to become widespread here. It would represent a serious barrier to entry for upstart browser vendors. This is bad.
We want to invite as much competition as possible. It's true that if you only account for Mozilla, it's not that big of a deal, because at the end of the day they can afford to pay some licensing fees if they have to. It is a big deal for something like Midori or Epiphany or Konqueror or any other such projects because their usability will be strongly diminished by an inability to play online video. This is a bad thing.
Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world.
QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.