Convert video with vp9 codec using ffmpeg

Question

I am trying to convert input.mp4 video to output.mkv using vp9 codec. I have install development version of ffmpeg via: brew install ffmpeg --devel.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec vp9 output.mkv

But I am getting error: Unknown encoder 'vp9' even the vp9 is included: ffmpeg -codecs

Answer 1

The most basic command is:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -c:a libopus output.webm

See FFmpeg Wiki: VP9 for more info.

Answer 2

With my version of ffmpeg,

$ ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version 2.3.3 Copyright (c) 2000-2014 the FFmpeg developers

the command looks like this

ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 2000k -pass 1 -an -f webm /dev/null
ffmpeg    -i input.mkv -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 2000k -pass 2 -c:a opus -b:a 64k -f webm output.webm

i.e.

• leave out the experimental flags
• do a two pass encoding, because the first two seconds of the output are blurry otherwise. Doing a two pass encoding is also faster than single pass.
• when doing 2 pass, you do not need to encode the audio in the first pass as @FrankGalligan noted in a comment

Single pass is/was broken, according to http://wiki.webmproject.org/vp9/known-issues