VP8VP9

VP8 and VP9 are video codecs developed by Google as part of the WebM project. VP8 was introduced in 2008 by On2 Technologies and was later acquired by Google in 2010. It became a core component of WebM, an open, royalty-free format for web video, and was accompanied by free reference implementations to encourage broad adoption in browsers and streaming platforms.

VP9, released in 2013, is the successor to VP8 and aims to deliver higher compression efficiency for the same video quality. It enables better video quality at lower bitrates and supports higher resolutions, including 4K and beyond. VP9 introduces more advanced tools for motion compensation, parallel decoding through tiling, improved color and bit-depth handling, and enhanced error resilience. Like VP8, VP9 is designed for use in streaming contexts and is supported by major browsers through the WebM ecosystem.

Adoption and ecosystem: VP9 is widely used for web video delivery, notably by YouTube, and is supported in major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Hardware decoding support exists across many modern GPUs and mobile chipsets, enabling efficient playback on a range of devices. The primary open-source implementation of both codecs is libvpx, maintained as part of the WebM project, providing reference encoders and decoders.

Licensing and legacy: VP8 and VP9 are part of the WebM suite and are intended to be royalty-free for WebM deployments. They are commonly viewed as precursors to AV1, a newer open codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, which aims to offer further improvements in efficiency and ecosystem support while maintaining openness and royalty-free usage.