This is a badly researched article.

I think you're misreading the part of the article about comparison images. I believe the article does not mean to imply that Garrett-Glaser did not post comparison images, I think it meant to imply that unlike the comparison images posted by Garrett-Glaser, those posted by StreamingMedia used comparable bit rates. Ironically, the article is still wrong, as all files are between 16 and 17 MB in size, the VP8 one being among the larger.

If you read what the actual comparisons compared, though, you'll find something interesting. Garret-Glaser compared VP8 to various codecs, including H264 with either of baseline and high profile, and concluded that VP8 is roughly comparable to the baseline profile, but noticeably worse than the high profile. StreamingMedia compared VP8 only to the H264 baseline profile and also found they where very much comparable, i.e. the exact same result with a rather different slant.

The question is what people _should_ be comparing VP8 with. It seems to me that the H264 baseline profile is what is actually used in the real world today. The video players on my system (mplayer and Totem under Jaunty) could not correctly play the high profile H264-clip from Garret-Glaser's site. My n900 phone claims to support h264 but only supports the baseline profile. My previous phone, the iPhone, also only supports the baseline profile. As near as I can tell from my own experiences, if we're considering VP8 as the challenger that needs to displace the currently entrenched H264 with it's vast base of installed players, we must compare VP8 with H264 baseline, because that seems to be the only thing that can be reliably played on systems advertising H264 support. On the other hand, if we're talking pure tech and wondering about which format has the coolest technical toys, there is no reason to restrict our comparison to the baseline profile any more.