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Is this thread about the quality difference between the two, or the long-term support comparison? Or how to encode for stand-alones? All distinct topics.
For stand-alones and H.264, stick with a common denominator of QT compatibility, a standard within a standard, and you won't go wrong, even if it costs a bit more bitrate. However, hardware will eventually catch up with MRFs, B-pyramids, etc in due time, even though they make several decoders choke today.
Don't care what Apple TV and iPod are accepting. These machines have obvious tech limitations, not restrictions on a standard. It's also Apple's way of skimming the market, making us keep buying the "next great exciting" model coming up... In 5 years time my phone will be playing all my encoded clips of today, with all the gravy, and it doesn't even have to be a phone from Apple either...
Personally, I would say that for better support you can't go wrong with an MPEG codec. H.264 is the latest face of MPEG. In fact it *IS* MPEG.
The only reason VC-1 even got this far is because its parade is led by M$, otherwise it would be scratching for a niche market like VP-7 and RV10 are.
H.264 is also an open standard, while VC-1 has proprietary characteristics. There is no "corporation" that owns H.264, and any support it gets is rather genuine, which is plenty. VC-1's support is biased, as is those comments from obvious backers of the big M.
Quality difference? Don't care. Even if VC-1 is "better" quality, which I have yet to see evidence of, it wouldn't be distinguishable enough to beat an MPEG codec.
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