Potential Support For VP9 & Opus

Logan589XP wrote on 10/25/2023, 3:17 AM

I know when Vegas 21 came out a few months ago someone on the team here on the forum mentioned that AV1 support would be coming later this year and I'm really looking forward to that.

However, I'd like to request for support of VP9 and Opus as well as both codecs are widely used by Google for YouTube's high quality encodes and thus would remove the need to transcode those files after downloading from YouTube to a format that's supported in Vegas. Also, Opus in particular just in general is a really good lossy audio codec, especially at lower bitrates.

I don't know how feasible this addition is (or how long it would take) but both codecs are open source like AV1 is for what that's worth and we already have plug-ins like Voukoder (awesome plug-in btw) that can export to those codecs already, but for me at least being able to import VP9 and Opus is what's most important.

Comments

andyrpsmith wrote on 10/25/2023, 4:32 AM

If you really mean VP9 it's not going to happen as this is an old Sony product long superseded by many versions. Sony no longer even own Vegas Pro.

(Intel 3rd gen i5@4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, 1080Ti GPU, Windows 10) Not now used with Vegas.

13th gen i913900K - water cooled, 96GB RAM, 4TB M2 drive, 4TB games SSD, 2TB video SSD, GPU RTX 4080 Super, Windows 11 pro

EricLNZ wrote on 10/25/2023, 4:37 AM

@andyrpsmith I suspect Logan means this codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9

andyrpsmith wrote on 10/25/2023, 4:40 AM

Thanks for the clarification, now makes sense.

(Intel 3rd gen i5@4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, 1080Ti GPU, Windows 10) Not now used with Vegas.

13th gen i913900K - water cooled, 96GB RAM, 4TB M2 drive, 4TB games SSD, 2TB video SSD, GPU RTX 4080 Super, Windows 11 pro

Reyfox wrote on 10/25/2023, 5:55 AM

VP9 support would be nice.

Newbie😁

Vegas Pro 22 (VP18-21 also installed)

Win 11 Pro always updated

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 cores / 32 threads

32GB DDR4 3200

Sapphire RX6700XT 12GB Driver: 25.3.1

Gigabyte X570 Elite Motherboard

Panasonic G9, G7, FZ300

Former user wrote on 10/25/2023, 8:23 AM

Resolve has VP9 support, but only in a mkv or mp4 wrapper, it doesn't support Opus

Capcut supports VP9 in webm,mkv and mp4, it also supports Opus audio.

Capcut being a Chinese company may be more willing to take risks on codec support where licensing is in a gray area with Resolve being on the conservative end. Fraunhofer and Dolby have made patent claims on Opus, I have read that payment is only required for hardware that decodes and encodes Opus, and software is not affected, but also read it's open source software that is not affected, not all software.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 10/25/2023, 9:46 AM

Voukoder does it now. Just tested RedCar with v13.1 and it rendered vp9-opus to mkv in 27 sec using vp9_qsv. Render with default Magix qsv avc is 18 sec on same machine (9900k with Radeon7 + Arc a380). When Voukoder 1st supported vp9 last year, (I think it was a v10 beta), it was using the ffmpeg software encoder and was too slow to be practical for me. I tested a YouTube upload of their mkv and it took it without a problem. Seems to be practical with qsv rendering now. Not sure if latest Nvidias also do it.

Also just tried it with Voukoder Pro v0.7.5 and it knocked it out to an mp4 in 19 sec. That's about the same as a Magix avc qsv render. I see Pro up to v0.7.8 beta since I looked last. Haven't tried it on my laptop yet which has an Iris igpu.

VEGASDerek wrote on 10/25/2023, 9:50 AM

VP9 support is on our roadmap, but it is a bit far down the road at the moment. Our team media/video engine team is working on two specific things at the moment...AV1 support and a major rebuild of the video engine. Once we have good traction on the video engine, we will begin to turn our attention again to additional format support.

john_dennis wrote on 10/25/2023, 5:16 PM

@Logan589XP said Vegas support of VP9 would: "... remove the need to transcode those files after downloading from YouTube to a format that's supported in Vegas."

The business model that you appear to be proposing is that you download media created by others in a delivery format, (not an acquisition format) and you want Vegas Creative Software to assist you in this effort by diverting resources away from fixing bugs and improving performance to create at least a second generation media file with less effort on your part.

I suspect, even the programs that already decode VP9 and Opus would work better with an editing codec.

Logan589XP wrote on 10/31/2023, 3:18 AM

@VEGASDerek Thanks for the reply! Not surprised that VP9 is a ways off but it's nice to know it's coming eventually. That new reworking of the video engine sounds good too.

Former user wrote on 10/31/2023, 8:32 AM
 

I suspect, even the programs that already decode VP9 and Opus would work better with an editing codec.

@john_dennis

This is YT 4K30 VP9 on a 4K timeline, Clicking on various locations on timeline is pretty instant, scrubbing is not as smooth as a good Camera AVC codec, but this is most likely because instead of a Camera codec with maybe a GOP of 12 or 24 this file is GOP128. That would likely mean for every frame displayed when scrubbing the decoder needs to find the I frame up to 128 frames away. You can see the play across edit points but showing transitions is pointless in capcut as they are automatically cached.

So you can either look forward to or seethe about the existence of VP9 in Vegas in the future. With the new render engine I would expect same playback, no requirement for transcoding to an editing codec.

Also a self correction, Resolve does load VP9 in webm container and does play opus audio in an mp4 container but not mkv or webm which is unusual.

john_dennis wrote on 10/31/2023, 9:51 AM

@Former user said: "So you can either look forward to or seethe about the existence of VP9 in Vegas in the future."

I'm agnostic to the existence of VP9. I think I noticed that the Google Pixel phones use it or will use it in the future, so one could call that acquisition. I'm unlikely to use it. There are also a large number of video formats in use in all kinds of cameras that I will likely not use.

mark-y wrote on 10/31/2023, 2:04 PM

The bruhaha over VP9 in Vegas is that it is Youtube's download option for "higher" quality (but still not out of the swamp). There may be some reasons for Vegas to import it, but that isn't one of them.

Former user wrote on 10/31/2023, 5:28 PM

And on a related matter (coming attractions to Vegas) YouTube's AV1 edits like a camera codec. Was not expecting that. It scrubs smoother than VP9. I can only see the first GOP which is 16, but it may be dynamic.

I am still supportive of VP9 though, AV1 is a minority compared to VP9 for YT encodes and VP9 has the widest compatibility with GPU decoders.

Logan589XP wrote on 11/2/2023, 12:47 AM

I feel I should clarify what exactly I meant by VP9 & Opus being the highest quality download option for YouTube.

It's not really that it's a newer codec (although that does help) it's more so that it's the only way to get higher res downloads because YouTube only offers H.264 encodes for 1080p and lower, so if you want to download a video in higher resolution you have to download in VP9 with Opus for audio (AAC is also used sometimes) in order to get full quality.

Here's some example screenshots from 4K Video Downloader+

It is worth noting that there are some videos I have seen offered in 4K AV1 in MP4, but those are rare at least for now, the vast majority is VP9 with either Opus or AAC audio.

RogerS wrote on 11/2/2023, 12:58 AM

I grab these files and then convert them with ShutterEncoder to AVC and it looks good and edits well in VEGAS.

Even if we get VP9 support so it would open it may not be easy to edit without a proxy file, so I'd rather just do a conversion upfront.

Former user wrote on 11/2/2023, 9:46 AM

@RogerS VP9/AV1 + new render engine. The excessive GOP's on YouTube often 250, but I've seen 304 affect scrubbing but seems fine otherwise. This is 4K24 AV1 from YT on a 4K timeline, 3 staggered tracks with blended masking, playing at up to 8x speed. The bottleneck is the Nvidia hardware not the software, and that's what I'm expecting with the new Vegas, the biggest upgrade of all time.

There could be suspicion that given the low CPU and GPU use (3d) that the GPU decoder is syncing with cached video, and playback is cached video, but the generated cache for this project is 53mb, whatever that is, it's not video.

@Logan589XP I'm trying to see a pattern with the AV1 encodes but haven't worked it out yet. AV1 is also used for 1080P and below with popular videos. Example right now this video is only VP9, but most likely within 24 hours it will also be AV1, not that it matters much just as long it's not AVC, the trash YT codec.

 

 

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 11/4/2023, 11:19 AM
 

Oops.

My interests in av1 are decoding support should camera makers swap hevc with av1. And lossless av1 encoding for intermediates and archiving. For encoding, I haven't seen any hardware support for lossless av1 yet. But I haven't found any for lossless hevc either. I've done a little performance/quality encoding analysis with ffmpeg and av1 has been roughly equal to hevc... but definitely not superior. One problem I saw was that I had to make a lossless av1 reference clip for quality analysis with AOM, which is really, really slow. And output was quite a bit larger than lossless hevc. But with that lossless av1 clip in hand, I'm prepared to assess Vegas av1 decoding when it it's released... looking forward to that.

Former user wrote on 11/4/2023, 5:20 PM

@Howard-Vigorita Apparently that video contained a split second shot of a person holding a passport from a news report and was legible.

I have only done a couple of tests on the Nvenc AV1 encoder, at lower bitrates AV1 equaled X264 or exceeded it's quality according to VMAF but at higher bitrates Nvenc AV1 can't compete, bit disappointing really. Looking forward to your Vegas AV1 analysis