codecs

In addition, Xiph also has two lossy codecs, Vorbis and Opus, which are actually designed for lossy encoding.

People on platforms that already contain and expose closed-source codecs are unlikely to be concerned about these issues.

You actually have to install support for proprietary codecs and things like that yourself (but it's easy).

But they are very interesting, and these kinds of tricks do find some practical use in things like video codecs.

Who has multiple implementations of the same codecs (2 prores decoders, at least 2 prores encoders) or libraries (2 resampling libraries)?

It is then up to the user to choose a platform with the desired codecs, which may be open or closed.

I have literally never been able to play DVDs in Windows without installing third party codecs or programs.

Actually, Firefox uses the platform decoders to decode patented codecs like H264 or AAC.

Choosing one or the other gives you different set of features, but mostly different set of bugs and level of support of codecs.

Minidisc always sounded better than mp3 to me, but I never tried out the other codecs that Apple use.

Last time I checked neither OS even supported reading Matroska containers natively, and containers are pretty simple compared to codecs.

While it might be true for API changes and cleanups, FFmpeg has dozens of additionnal codecs and formats, as well as way more assembly/optimization code.

But since Michael alone seems to "outdevelop" all others, ffmpeg comes ahead in terms of features and supported codecs, so people prefer ffmpeg.

Also 9 year old is quite a frac cry from your initial post of "(3y+) machines", 9 year old machine almost guaranteed has absolutely no support in hardware for modern codecs.

No commercial product has the motivation to keep making improvements to their code that already works "well enough", and they don't have as good a set of working optimizations to apply to new codecs.