[zerowalker]

You wouldn't happen to live in Europe or near a Google Fiber city, would you?

I live in Europe yes, near a Google Fiber city though, got no idea of that, i live pretty much in the middle of nowhere, it's surprising there is even fiber here, it's not in the City at all.

2.5GHz Athlon 64 x2 4800+ Brisbane 65nm G2

(that enough information for you? :P)

Hmm, i can decode 1080p vp9 with about 15% use. which in is 30% if i had 2 cores.
But i got a 4ghz OC intel, so not really comparable i guess.

But i am guessing it runs at 100% for you and not keeping up?

Actually back at the Google IO when they first presented VP9 their focus was purely on today's resolutions and quality with less bandwidth. (of course they didn't do this either, but I'm sure most of us would take better quality with the same bandwidth instead)

Better Quality, Same Bandwidth, can't agree more on that.

What happened instead is at the end of the presentation during the Q&A there was one guy that asked if this could be used for 4k content and Google said that it essentually supports up to something like 16k, most likely because most open-source formats are not designed with planned obsolescence. (see: Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio both maxing out at 192KHz 24bit, and yet both FLAC and WavPack both compress better and support sampling rates into the MHz)

Also another guy inquired about Google's use of what was arguably the worst HEVC encoder for their h.265 comparison. After that Google started to push a bit more on comparing VP9 against h.265, but never really came out and specified that it was specifically for 4k video. Instead it ended up being the fact that h.265 was targeting 4k video, and since VP9 was competing with h.265 and was 4k capable, a lot of people made the jump that VP9 was targeting 4k video as well.

Open-Source has that wonderful power of evolving into the never-ending

Ah, that explains it.
I actually looked at VP9 before 4k and looked at pretty much all presentations, and now that i think about it, the thing that they went on and on about was simply lowering bandwidth, tehy didn't mention Resolution.

But well, HEVC as proven that 4k looks great at low bitrates compared to x264, so they have to use VP9 for that in the end anyway, else things are looking grim;P

This isn't quite true anymore, a few years ago "Original" was instead renamed to either 1440p or 2160p depending on the resolution of the video in question (note that even though the format maxes out at 4096x3072 they still label it at 2160p)

Ah, that's true, find it pretty disturbing, i am so used to the thing that anything above 1080p was in the "Original" category, i found it quite amusing, but as they have expanded their resolutions, it went into the abyss