YouTube now adding VP9 option to popular videos

[zerowalker]

Will that be decodable with the default VP9, or will the branch have to merge or something?

hmm,... high bit depth sounds nice (probably it will slow things down even more)

No kidding, currently VP9 is so slow it's not practical at all.

Fun fact though, Youtube have started to use it on Videos as a "Standard", it seems that they encode all popular videos (about 10k views) to VP9 according to my fast research.
What i would like to know though is.

How in the world are they able to encode all the videos if VP9 is that slow, even if they only do 10k videos, it's still pretty insane.

Never the less, it's not all 10k videos, just overall, also the bitrate compared to mp4(h264) is less.

1080p is about 3-4k bitrate with h264 if i remember correctly,
VP9 is about 2.5, taken the numbers from my head right now so take it with a grain of salt.

I have also compared the encoding of some videos, and well, they beat each other at different things.
Overall however, h264 wins, which i find quite surprising as the settings they use for it it's extremely bad.