Wait until you see VP13
It'll just send the string "Terminator 7", and an entirely predictable 2 hour movie will be played.
Users have watched 25 billion hours of YouTube videos encoded with Google's VP9 codec, which the company says brings the net closer to instant high-quality bufferless video. The Choc Factory's open source VP9 is designed as a replacement for the popular patented H.264 and HEVC codecs and is particularly valuable for mobile …
VP8 probably paid for itself in foregone licence fees for H264 for Google, given how much video they actually encode. VP8 effectively put an end to the plans for charging us all to use H264. Google has also been true to its word in opening the source and indemnifying against patent suits.
Having competing codecs is good for us all in the long run. Google has several reasons for continuing to improve the format: the rise in high resolution content on YouTube preludes high resolution video on demand. Even if most of it is shit, the sheer volume of video that YouTube handles is staggering. Any efficiencies in file size and bitrate will be keenly felt. Google continues to push into our lives and wants to sell us paid for content: quality and perceived network speed will be differentiators on mobile devices. It is also continuing to improve user-generated video whether it's video-conferencing, selfies or gaming videos.
In the H264 version, a lot of the transverse ceiling tile support frames are blurred out of existence, while they are visible in the VP9 version. Also, if you look at the woman in the middle who is split between the images, in the H264 version you can see jagged lines along the edges of her leg, while the edges on the VP9 version are clear. The same is true for straight edges along the walls as well. The "jaggies" are there to some extent in VP9, but they are much smaller and less prominent than in the H264 version.
The VP9 version definitely has a better picture. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would notice any difference if I wasn't actually looking for one.
I suspect the biggest advantage will be in terms of reduced bandwidth needs for VP9. That matters to YouTube who are paying a lot of bandwidth bills, and also to end users who are watching the videos via their mobile phone or capped Internet connections.
Since Google owns the dominant mobile phone OS and a major computer web browser, they can push the VP9 codec out to most of the market. Firefox also supports it, and it's built into a lot of newer televisions. On the source side, YouTube is a very big chunk of total Internet bandwidth. So if Google wants to use it, it's going to get used on a really big scale.
HEVC/h.265 will be built into everything. VP9 will be built into a handful of things. Besides Google, no one is going to use VP9 - unless Google wants to open the door for the competition they'll have to support HEVC for that large majority of devices that will never support VP9.
Yes, there is a licensing cost for HEVC but it is quite reasonable and there's no guarantee that someone doesn't have patents against VP9. Much more likely there are unknown patents against it, in fact, because of how many parties were involved in the development of HEVC versus pretty much only Google developing VP9. If I held a patent against VP9 I'd be sitting on it for a few years letting it gain whatever traction it can before shaking people down. Do it now, and you'll just scare away anyone who might be considering an alternative to HEVC.
Yes, there is a licensing cost for HEVC but it is quite reasonable and there's no guarantee that someone doesn't have patents against VP9.
Google has already indemnified the code and settled with patent holders. There will be no suits against VP9, though there won't really need to be any. H265 is better than VP9 but time to market is key and Google is aligning its codec strategy with the silicon strategy of the phone makers. It's also making hardware support for VP9 and the upcoming VP10 a requirement for some of its licences. With YouTube and its own video-on-demand services, both on mobile devices and increasingly on televisions, it is already one of the bigger players in the market. So, it's naive to bet against them.
Surely you aren't so naive as to think there are no patents out there that VP9 infringes on? I'm sure the same is true for HEVC as well, but indemnification (assuming it isn't without clauses and gotchas) does no good if you get served with an ITC suit that demands an export halt. Google can't indemnify you against that.
It comes down to whether you trust that everyone who wants to belly up at the trough has come out of the woodwork. They probably have for HEVC, since once it was made a standard it was too late to change things to avoid patent infringement. VP9 has so little adoption outside of Google that it pays to for patent holders to wait for wider adoption - because if they strike too soon they might scare off anyone considering its use.