Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8: "The killer mistake that VP8 has made here is not making macroblock-level quantization a core feature of VP8. Algorithms that take advantage of macroblock-level quantization are known as ‘adaptive quantization’ and are absolutely critical to competitive visual quality. My implementation of variance-based adaptive quantization (before, after) in x264 still stands to this day as the single largest visual quality gain in x264 history. Encoder comparisons have showed over and over that encoders without adaptive quantization simply cannot compete.
"
-