Wow, my VP9 vs H.264 takeaways are: - for encoding: libvpx always matches or surpasses the quality of x264 (at a given bitrate or at a given CPU budget), becau

Wow, my VP9 vs H.264 takeaways are: - for encoding: libvpx always matches or surpasses the quality of x264 (at a given bitrate or at a given CPU budget), because the red line (libvpx) is always on or above the blue line (x264) here: https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/files/2015/09/vp9-x264-x265-encoding-speed-1024x752.png https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/files/2015/09/vp9-x264-x265-... (Except there is no libvpx data for CPU budget under ~0.2 SPF —which is a bit annoying, I know for one I do most of my encodings spending around 0.05-0.15 seconds per frame.) - for single-threaded decoding: ffvp9 is faster than ffh264 - for multi-threaded decoding: ffvp9 is a bit slower than ffh264 On top of that, the VP9 implementations are bound to become faster (whereas not much more improvement can be made to already-mature H.264 implementations), so VP9 is bound to become even more preferable over H.264 over time. I think the author's first concluding bullet point ("next-gen codecs provide 50% bitrate improvements over x264, but are 10-20x as slow") is poorly worded. Sure, you can make the next-gen codecs ultra slow by using the highest quality settings, but for libvpx you should choose less agressive settings, and you will still beat the quality of x264 at the same CPU cost. Edit: in addition, these benchmarks show that as of today out of all these implementations, VP9 even matches or beats HEVC on all aspects (encoding at a given bitrate, encoding at a given CPU budget, single- and multi-threaded decoding). But I expect this to change as HEVC implementations are all quite still immature.