Cause most people don't have OnStar. I don't know anybody with it.

Oh the irony.

Here's my comment from the discussion on Engadget. I grabbed the video file and opened it in Media Info. 4K Video for "Life in the Garden": Bit rate : 6 445 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 19.4 Mbps Width : 4 096 pixels Height : 2 304 pixels 1080p Version Bit rate : 3 350 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 5 728 Kbps Width : 1 920 pixels Height : 1 080 pixels Probably the most important thing thing, and the number that corresponds most to subjective image quality, is the Bits per pixel/frame. The 1080p manages 0.067, while the 4K halves that to just 0.028. The 720p is higher actually, with 0.085. (The 480p manages even higher with 0.157) A 1080p Blu-ray can hit 0.567, if not higher. What I mean by that number corresponding to subjective image quality, is that the higher that number, the closer the it should look to the source video the encoder is taking in. In short, this "4K" mode is a complete and utter joke. 4K is the holy grail of HD, many films are shot, edited, restored, etc all in 4K, and the day that true 4K comes to consumers will be glorious. YouTube has essentially taken a giant dump on 4K, and presented to the world as their pride and joy. Good game YouTube, next map please.

iPhone 4 records video at 10.8 Mbps baseline 3.1, 1280x720 at 29.97fps. Most of the DSLRs that shoot video, shoot in h264 and consumer cameras are increasingly switching to h264 as they dump tape based recording methods. It's nice that the authors didn't really bother trying to find properly high bitrate stuff as source materials. Oh well.

According to this wiki page: http://wiki.xiph.org/Theora_Hardware there are 3 devices that support Theora decoding. H.264 hardware decoders are included a huge number of things. If H.264 had been chosen as the HTML5 video codec, it would have been trivially easy to implement playback on a huge number of devices, from the original iPhone to a huge number of computers with H.264 hardware decoders but slow CPUs. If H.264 had been chosen, HTML5 video would have hit the ground running and got alot of support behind it. If Theora had been chosen, it would take 1-2 years for devices to add in compatibility. I'm all for open source and royalty free licensing, but it's pretty hard to compete with H.264. A new codec isn't going to help things either.

It is alright for them to make the buyers unable to play with their PC friends who got the game years earlier.

Halo for PC came out only a month or two before the Mac version. Also, I have played online games with people who have the mac version of Halo. I have NO IDEA where your claims are coming from.