I started encoding everything in VP9. Family videos. Screen recordings. A timelapse of my basil plant growing. Each one taught me something new about spatial prediction, entropy coding, the quiet beauty of a well-tuned --end-usage=q.
libvpx — Google’s VP8/VP9 encoder library — is not friendly. It doesn’t hold your hand. Its command-line flags look like an eldritch incantation: a different man libvpx
I’m more patient. I appreciate trade-offs. I no longer believe in “best settings” — only “settings for this video, this audience, this night.” I started encoding everything in VP9
I realized I wasn’t just encoding pixels. I was making choices. And those choices made me a different kind of creator — one who understands that quality is not a slider but a conversation between encoder and content. VP9 came next. Twice as complex. Four times the options. Row-based multithreading. Alt-ref frames. Frame super-resolution. Each new flag was a door into a deeper room. A timelapse of my basil plant growing