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Those are audio codecs, not video codecs. Xiph worked on Theora for 7 years and never got close to H.264, and Daala is promising but HEVC is amazing right now.

Theora and Daala are both hamstrung by working around minefields of patents on essential processes to video processing.

Interestingly, the Vorbis project only really took off after mp3 started facing licensing issues. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis

> Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.

Who says patents don't promote innovation? :-)

(I'm only half-joking - invention forced by working around patents has long been a post-facto justification of patents.)

Also, nit, it wasn't all done by just "1 FOSS guy". From the same wikipedia link:

> Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers.

In my case, a substantial amount of my work on Opus was done literally from my basement (sorry, I didn't have a garage).