High-quality export presets for VP9

Resources
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Why VP9?

I recently worked on a project where old computers needed to play high-quality 4K video. AV1 was not viable because CPU decoding was too slow, and hardware decoding was not supported. The project needed a royalty-free codec for distribution reasons, which disqualified H.264 and HEVC. That made VP9 the top contender. It can hardware decode on old devices like H.264, but is free to use commercially like AV1. Smartphones and all major web browsers support VP9, meaning it has maximum compatibility. The encoding times were reasonable for the file sizes and quality targets. It became a good middle ground. I’m sharing my presets from the project in case someone else gets into a similar situation.

The presets

  • VP9 Premium Film

    • Visually lossless.
    • Any frame can be extracted as a photo, and it will look as good as its source.
    • File size is a fraction of intermediate and lossless formats.
    • Ideal for valuable 4K footage if AV1 is not viable.
    • VP9 Premium Film.txt (578 Bytes)

  • VP9 Standard Film

    • Balance of file size and quality.
    • Looks excellent at normal playback speed.
    • Details are retained better than Shotcut’s x264 default settings.
    • Ideal for 1080p mobile devices and 4K general archiving.
    • VP9 Standard Film.txt (577 Bytes)

The presets meet their design goals at both 1080p and 4K. They have “film” in their names because they are optimized for camera footage and realistic video games. They hold grain and texture well, and have been tested against water, fur, hair, grass, leaves, skin, fabrics, cloud banks, low light, and other difficult scenarios. They are not optimized for flat cartoons or screen recordings of PowerPoint slides. VP9 has a separate screen mode that is designed for that kind of video.

VP9 can also be tweaked to support 10-bit, 4:2:2, HDR, and alpha transparency if needed.

Installation

Copy the files to your platform’s encode folder. If it doesn’t exist, then create it. Then remove the .txt extensions, as those were required to upload the files to the forum.

  • Windows:
    • %LocalAppData%\Meltytech\Shotcut\presets\encode
  • Mac/Linux:
    • ~/.local/share/Meltytech/Shotcut/presets/encode

Restart Shotcut. The presets will appear under the Custom section of the Export panel.

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On macOS, it is ~/Library/Application Support/Meltytech/Shotcut/presets/encode

But another simple way to get there is by choosing from the main menu Settings > App Data Directory > Show…, which opens the file manager (except on certain Linux configurations). And then you need to descend into the subfolders presets > encode.

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Thanks. I don’t have a Mac, so I copied and pasted the path from an older forum thread on total faith.

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x264 is free, included in Shotcut OR no?

264 is a free software library and application for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL.

In 2006, videos on Linux had the extension “.ogg”, now I don’t know if it was completely replaced by “.mkv”, nor do I know if it makes any difference to change the extension, because the file explorer doesn’t identify them by that.

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Yes, by default Shotcut uses the libx264 codec, which is the same x264