There was once a blog titled "Diary Of An x264 Developer" that gave some interesting detail of how h264 worked and the and the x264 implementation. It's still available on via the internet archive.
Tied as the leading implementation by 2006, pulled far ahead in SSIM in 2010, and all FOSS. Hat off to Glaser and Merritt!
An interesting Baader–Meinhof for me when I first heard: Glaser (as Dark Shikari) used to be active on HN and wrote the quote (oft misattributed to Descartes),
Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
