The world’s best VP9 encoder: Eve

A few reasons: (1) x264 is better optimized for metrics, especially PSNR. Example: removing --tune=psnr gives x264 a 12% decrease in its PSNR score in this test set (!); (2) the resolution here is only 360p, and as resolution goes down, so do gains versus codecs optimized for high-resolution content (like HEVC/VP9); (3) this article uses inverse notation, so instead of "H264 uses 50% more bits than X for same quality" (which is the same as X using 33% less bits than H264 for same quality), this article says "Eve uses 15-20% less bits than x264 for same quality".

You slightly overstate the case, since VP9 can be decoded in hardware in various devices, though they are much less numerous than those with h.264 support.

What I'd personally rank as the #1 issue would be the refusal of Apple to support VP9 (Microsoft only recently having got on board) So a single file can't be used by your whole audience.

Even if Apple says yes today there's a lot of their legacy hardware out there.

So this leaves mostly high volume sites that have multiple encodes anyway, and can justify it on quality/bandwidth or those taking a moral stance on the issue, like wikipedia.

Which makes me rather irritated to see it advertised on blogs.gnome.org, of all places.

Useless comment. Everyone needs to pay rent.

If you don't want to pay for this, then just use libvpx.

In any case, it's good to see another entry in the one-horse race of VP(9) encoders.

CRF: x264 --preset=veryslow --tune=psnr --quiet --demuxer=y4m --no-progress --threads=1 --profile=high -o $output.264 $input.y4m --crf=X VBR: x264 --preset=veryslow --tune=psnr --quiet --demuxer=y4m --no-progress --threads=1 --profile=high -o $output.264 $input.y4m --bitrate=X --stats=stats.2pass_log --pass=1/2 Visual: same as VBR but without --tune=psnr.