VP9 Video Codec
VP9, the WebM Project's next-generation open video codec, became available on June 17, 2013. This page summarizes post-release VP9 topics of interest to the WebM community.
Last modified 2017-03-27
Draft VP9 Bitstream and Decoding Process Specification
Interested parties are invited to review the current draft of the VP9 Bitstream Specification.
Note carefully:
- The specification is not final.
- The team has performed one level of review internally, and now seeks external review.
- We have compiled the syntax tables into an application, and verified that
Argon Design's test streams produce output identical to
vpxenc. - We are particularly interested in verification of the document's textual content.
Please direct commentary to the codec-discuss mailing list. Note that first-time posts by unsubscribed readers are queued for moderation. You can avoid moderation by subscribing first.
Download: vp9-bitstream-specification-v0.6-20160331-draft.pdf (2.37MB PDF)
Related Documents
VP Codec ISO Media File Format Binding
VP9 Profiles and Levels
HDR10+ Metadata Handling
HDR10+ metadata can be specified in the form of ITU-T T.35 terminal codes. See the BlockAddID element in the WebM Container Guidelines. ATSC 2094-40/CTA-861.4 define one of the possible ways to specify HDR10+ metadata.
Acquiring VP9 (libvpx)
As of 2013-06-17, VP9 encode and decode support ships in the master branch of libvpx, and is enabled by default.
git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libvpx
cd libvpx
git co master ## likely unnecessary
./configure
makeOr consider an out-of-tree build, described in Build Prerequisites.
VP9 encoder options are listed in the usage output for vpxenc, in the
section "VP9 Specific Options".
User-Contributed Pages
Product Support
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft announced in April 2016 that the Edge browser will support VP9 (and Opus).
WebRTC
VP9 in WebRTC became available in Google Chrome 48 (stable) in January 2016, for both desktop and Android.
Google Chrome
VP9 decode support was first enabled by default in Google Chrome 29 Dev channel (r206883) on 2013-06-26.
Mozilla Firefox
VP9 decode support was first added to Firefox Aurora ("pre-beta") nightly builds on 2013-12-06.
VLC
Experimental VP9 decode support was added to VLC in version 2.1.2.
FFMpeg / Libav
- Search the FFMpeg codebase for recent libvpx-related commits
- Search the Libav codebase for recent libvpx-related commits