SVT-VP9

SVT-VP9 is a VP9 encoder developed by Intel & licensed under BSD+Patent.
Like its siblings in the SVT encoder family, it scales very well on multicore processors by default.

The reference encoder beats it in rate control flexibility and supports 10-bit color,
but SVT-VP9 is much faster out of the box. Development is slow (version 0.3.1 was tagged in December 2025), so don't expect rapid feature growth.

Installation

Linux & macOS

To build SVT-VP9 from source, first clone the repository & enter the build directory.

git clone https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-VP9
cd SVT-VP9/Build/linux

In the directory, simply run ./build.sh [flags] to build. Be aware that building requires CMake & either GCC or Clang.

Build release

./build.sh release

The compiled binaries will be in the Bin/Release directory, including SvtVp9EncApp.

Windows

To be filled. If you believe you can help, see our Contribution Guide.

Usage

Standalone

Raw YUV input only

Unlike its siblings, SvtVp9EncApp has no Y4M support. Feeding it a .y4m file fails with the misleading error Input yuv does not contain enough frames (the frame counter does file size ÷ raw frame size math & the Y4M header breaks it). Feed it raw YUV & always set -w, -h & -fps yourself.

Simple raw YUV input, preset 6

SvtVp9EncApp -i input.yuv -w 1920 -h 1080 -fps 24 -enc-mode 6 -q 40 -b output.ivf

Piping raw YUV from FFmpeg (stdin is supported)

ffmpeg -v error -i input.mkv -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p - | SvtVp9EncApp -i stdin -w 1920 -h 1080 -fps 24 -enc-mode 6 -q 40 -b output.ivf

Note that -n (frames to encode) is effectively required when reading from a pipe, since the encoder can't know the length of stdin. The most useful parameters:

• -enc-mode [0-9]

Speed preset; 0 is the slowest/best, 9 the fastest (the FFmpeg wrapper calls this preset).

• -q [0-63]

Quantizer value for constant-QP mode (the default rate control). Note this is the VP9 quantizer range, not HEVC's 0-51.

• -tune [0-2]

0 = VQ (visually optimized), 1 = OQ (PSNR/SSIM, the default), 2 = VMAF.

• -rc [0-2] & -tbr

Rate control: 0 = CQP (default), 1 = VBR, 2 = CBR, with the target bitrate set via -tbr.

• -intra-period [-2..255]

Distance between keyframes; -1 disables intra updates, -2 is auto. There is no scene change detection.

The output is an IVF stream; remux it with FFmpeg (ffmpeg -i output.ivf -c copy output.webm).

FFmpeg

There are patches bundled in the SVT-VP9 source code for an FFmpeg plugin that adds the libsvt_vp9 encoder.
The wrapper has never been merged into mainline FFmpeg, so a custom build with the plugin patch applied is required.
(An easy way to do so on Windows is using media-autobuild_suite.)

Operation is not too different from the SVT-AV1 FFmpeg integration. Your commands will generally look like this:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -c:v libsvt_vp9 -qp 38 -tune ssim -preset 7 -g 255 video_vp9.webm

Parameters

Parameter	Description
-qp	Quantizer value, higher = lower quality. Range is 1..51 in current patches, but -qmin/-qmax can be set as high as 69 for extreme low bitrates.
-preset	Speed preset. Range is 0..9, with 9 being fastest and default.
-tune	Quality metric. Can be "vq" (default), "ssim" or "vmaf".
-g	Size of the Group of Pictures. Range is -2..255, with -1 = no intraframe updates ever, -2 = "auto". We recommend you set it as high as possible for encode efficiency.
-rc	Rate control mode. Can be "cqp" (Constant Quantizer, default), "vbr" (Variable Bitrate) or "cbr" (Constant Bitrate). (Consider using vpxenc's two-pass mode if you really need to match a target bitrate.)
-level	Encoder level. Range is 1..6. Generally better not to set it.
-socket	Index of the CPU socket to use. By default it's -1, which uses "all available processors".

Supported Color Space

SVT-VP9 only supports 8-bit yuv420p.