Not from the board, (implies board of directors), but from TDF membership (board of trustees). This essentially means you have no voting power and no benefits, but you're still free to still contribute by fixing bugs, adding new features, mentoring, code review,... ("community"). This are all the things that would benefit TDF by getting more money from donations (and then use that money for useful things that are mentioned in this TDF blog post).

The process has its issues and could cause problems, but in practice I don't remember anyone reporting issues.

Also if you decide to forgo the reversibility you can get a bit more out of it as JXL is actually a superset of JPEG, so it can read the JPEG stream and convert it to JXL without complete recompression - it will just use more efficient structure of JXL and much more efficient (ANS vs. Huffman) entropy encoding. The additional savings compared to the reversible mode aren't big however.

Note that AAC (presumably they mean "Main Profile" rather than AAC-LC) has effectively the same efficiency as Opus. HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 have a higher efficiency than both Opus and AAC, and works great at lower bitrates in comparison to AAC."

This chart just roughly outlines (according to the feeling of Opus developers at that time) what to expect from Opus - a wide range of useful bitrates. It's not anything that was actually measured or something that can be used for drawing any conclusions from it. I mean - those nice curves and lack of any detail about the codecs used should give it away.

According to public (double blind) listening test that were performed by the Hydrogen audio group Opus does win over best HE-AAC codecs available at time when the test was performed - both at 64kbps and 96kbps bitrates [1] (Multiformat Tests).

[1] https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Li...

Camera with a lossy / lossless 12-bit, 14-bit JPEG XL would definitely be interesting for many photographers. Not everyone wants to be forced to do a complete post-processing with RAW. JPEG is to limited (8-bit only) and HEIF isn't much better, while not having much support (especially on the web) because of the patent situation.

If someone controls something it is the Chromium/AOM/AVIF/AV1 team that controls and decides what multimedia formats go inside Chrome/Chromium thus controlling what is used on the web and ignoring what the web community has to say about it.

The first link you posted about VP8 just writes that they'll create an experimental branch (back in 2010) where incompatible bitstream changes can go in. Guess what eventually happened with those changes? VP9

The second link is the link to the unfinished VP9 specification, however with VP9 they still had that "reference" decoder code is the specification approach. As VP9 started to gain traction, the demand for the specification became greater, so they post-hoc started writing one but as you can see, they never finished it. Still this doesn't mean the bitstream isn't frozen.

If AV1 would be released sooner it wouldn't be even as good as HEVC, which would be bad. VP9 is already that free-but-not-as-good-as-HEVC codec. Also they would need to release AV2 in 1 or 2 years (as the better-than-HEVC codec), which is just too soon after AV1 and would put a big question on why AV1 was released at all...