Bring her back, libvpx.
There’s a quiet but growing cry echoing through issue trackers, forum threads, and late-night Slack channels: “Bring her back, libvpx.”
For the uninitiated, libvpx is the open-source VP8 and VP9 video codec library developed by Google and the open-source community. It has powered everything from WebRTC video calls to high-efficiency streaming on YouTube and millions of self-hosted video platforms. But recently, some projects — especially lightweight browsers, media frameworks, and custom FFmpeg builds — have started dropping or sidelining libvpx. The reasons vary: build complexity, binary size, or a misguided belief that “everyone has moved to AV1.”