> People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry.

As someone who lead an open source team (of majority volunteers) for nearly a decade at Mozilla, I can tell you that people do work on video codecs for fun, see https://github.com/xiph/daala

Working with fine people from Xiph.Org and the IETF (and later AOM) on royalty free formats Theora, Opus, Daala and AV1 was by far the most fun, interesting and fulfilling work I've had as professional engineer.

Daala had some really good ideas, I only understand the coding tools at the level of a curious codec enthusiast, far from an expert, but it was really fascinating to follow its progress

Actually, are Xiph people still involved in AVM? It seems like it's being developed a little bit differently than AV1. I might have lost track a bit.