Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora.
For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.
Furthermore, it's not clear what Apple would stand to gain by enforcing its two patents that may or may not be relevant to Theora. Maybe I'm wrong, but media patent enforcement doesn't seem to be one of Apple's core businesses (HTC lawsuit notwithstanding). There are plenty of other companies, though, that likely have a vested interest in protecting their much-larger video patent portfolios.
I think it would be wrong to assume at this point that Apple is instigating patent litigation against Theora. Occam's razor would encourage the view that Apple knows the people who want to take down Theora and is rationally fearful of them.
H.264 can be encoded, using the same tools, in a way that can, or cannot, be hardware decoded.
iPhone (and Android phones) can decode only certain profiles (Baseline), and up to certain levels (depending on resolution). Even hardware assisted decoding with PC graphics cards can accelerate only up to certain level (usually high@4.1, but some nvidias can decode high@5).
The rest is more complex than hardware assisted decoders are able to decode and pure software codec has to be used.
Or just try playing high@ video on iphone.
I copied this High@3.0 file out of my iTunes library and it successfully syncs to my 3GS.
I can't get it to play over Wifi, while I can get a Main@3.0 file to play, but I think this has something to do with not enforcing some bitrate limit rather than the profile.
Search for "Baseline Profile" on this page for the full details:
I believe Jobs is talking about comparing two videos on the iPhone, with hardware accelerated video lasting 10 hours and non-accelerated video lasting 5 hours. You may not notice if you're not paying attention to battery while you watch video.
To the sibling comment here, I'm not referring to profiles. I'm referring to the fact that various implementations of H.264 encoders produce content that, depending on the implementation, may or may not be accelerated by the iPhone's PowerVR SGX 535.
One can produce a pair of H.264 encoded in .mp4 container movies, encoded from the same mpeg2ts original, one of which can use hardware acceleration, and the other of which cannot.
(I haven't had the chance to check yet if Adobe's 'Gala' responds the same way to such files on the desktop Macs Gala supports.)
Did you mean MPEG-4 Part 2 (Advanced Simple Profile)?