VP9

VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google.

VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. The emergence of the Alliance for Open Media, and its support for the ongoing development of the successor AV1, of which Google is a part, led to growing interest in the format.

In contrast to HEVC, VP9 support is common among modern web browsers (see HTML video § Browser support). Android has supported VP9 since version 4.4 KitKat, while Safari 14 added support for VP9 in iOS / iPadOS / tvOS 14 and macOS Big Sur.

Parts of the format are covered by patents held by Google. The company grants free usage of its own related patents based on reciprocity, i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigations.

VP9 is the last official iteration of the TrueMotion series of video formats that Google bought in 2010 for $134 million together with the company On2 Technologies that created it. The development of VP9 started in the second half of 2011 under the development names of Next Gen Open Video (NGOV) and VP-Next. The design goals for VP9 included reducing the bit rate by 50% compared to VP8 while maintaining the same video quality, and aiming for better compression efficiency than the MPEG High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In June 2013 the "profile 0" of VP9 was finalized, and two months later Google's Chrome browser was released with support for VP9 video playback. In October of that year a native VP9 decoder was added to FFmpeg, and to Libav six weeks later. Mozilla added VP9 support to Firefox in March 2014. In 2014 Google added two high bit depth profiles: profile 2 and profile 3.

In 2013 an updated version of the WebM format was published, featuring support for VP9 together with Opus audio.

In March 2013, the MPEG Licensing Administration dropped an announced assertion of disputed patent claims against VP8 and its successors after the United States Department of Justice started to investigate whether it was acting to unfairly stifle competition.

Throughout, Google has worked with hardware vendors to get VP9 support into silicon. In January 2014, Ittiam, in collaboration with ARM and Google, demonstrated its VP9 decoder for ARM Cortex devices. Using GPGPU techniques, the decoder was capable of 1080p at 30fps on an Arndale Board. In early 2015 Nvidia announced VP9 support in its Tegra X1 SoC, and VeriSilicon announced VP9 Profile 2 support in its Hantro G2v2 decoder IP.