vpx: VP8 and VP9 Encoder

The vpx codec supports both VP8 and VP9 formats. However, as of libvpx-v1.3.0 encoding using VP9 is so slow that it is totally useless.

Please also note that VP8 currently only supports YUV420P colour subsampled data, which leads to visual degradation.

Because of these shortcomings, the vpx codec lags well behind the x264 and NVENC video encoders.

Build and installation

When building xpra from source, vpx support is included by default.

For encoding and decoding support, you should install libvpx.

For decoding support only (client) it is possible to use the dec_avcodec or dec_avcodec2 modules if ​ffmpeg (or ​libav if you use this fork) were built with vpx support.

Links

• ​libvpx - The WebM Project
• ​wikipedia VP8

The following wiki pages are also relevant:

• wiki/WindowRefresh - when and how the screen updates are processed
• wiki/Encodings - all the picture encodings available
• wiki/CSC - the Colourspace conversion step

Tickets:

• #455 vpx improvements: vp9 support, zero copy, VBR, speed and quality
• #464 libvpx 1.3: vp9, scaling, lossless modes..