I thought it was roughly comparable to AVC baseline, though I admit not AVC main.
You're right, I'm not sure why I said ASP. The difference in quality between AVC Baseline and High is still pretty immense though -- lack of proper B-frames is pretty significant just by itself
Do you disagree with Google's course of action? If so, what should Google have done instead to keep webmasters from having to pay royalties on the videos they show to users of desktop computers and Android mobile devices?
As someone who loves technology, I'd have loved to see us come to some understanding with MPEG LA to just license their stuff for all HTML5 use. VP8 is going to result in either a lot more bandwidth usage (at YouTube levels, quite an impressive lot more) or a lot less quality.
As someone who loves freedom and creativity, I'm happy that we have anything and I'm thankful for Google doing whatever undisclosed thing they did to release VP8 from patent shackles. I do disagree very much with their methods of stirring up so much support with flat out lies -- if they hadn't gone through with licensing it, there'd have been a lot of wasted work and potentially even people in legal trouble for using the format. It was very shady.
One worry I have is that the internet will become a bit like American broadcast TV. We're still sending the hugely inefficient MPEG2 over the air. A sort of "moving standard" agreement with MPEG LA would be pretty awesome -- do we want to still be using VP9 as anything but a legacy-supported format in ten years? twenty? The moment we want to jump on a new codec, or say we just continue to develop VP9 into VP10, It's all but guaranteed some of the next-gen techniques will already have been patented.