VP9 is an open, royalty-free video compression codec developed by Google as the successor to VP8, achieving roughly half the bitrate of H.264 at comparable quality. It supports resolutions up to 8K, 10/12-bit colour depth, and is widely deployed for streaming on YouTube and within WebRTC real-time communication. VP9’s open licensing made it a key building block for browser-native video before AV1 succeeded it.
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- VP9 employs larger superblocks, more flexible partitioning, and improved entropy coding over VP8, with hardware decode support across modern GPUs and mobile SoCs. In low-latency contexts it competes with H.264 by offering better compression at the cost of higher encode complexity, a trade-off mitigated by real-time-tuned encoder presets.