Rick And Morty S01e06 Libvpx (2024)

Rick would approve. He doesn’t care about authenticity. He cares about functionality. The replacement Summer pours cereal just as well as the original Summer. The replacement Jerry is just as useless. The replacement MP4 plays on your iPhone just as well as the original MKV.

The episode’s final six minutes are a masterclass in nihilistic problem-solving. Rick doesn’t save the world. He finds a dimension where the Rick and Morty there did save the world, but then died in a subsequent lab accident. He and Morty bury their own corpses in the backyard and slide into their lives.

libvpx/VP9 was different. In 2014, hardware decoding for VP9 was rare. Software decoding was CPU-intensive. Playing a libvpx-encoded file on a laptop from 2012 meant fans spinning up like jet engines and dropped frames galore. Scene rules often rejected libvpx encodes for TV releases because they weren’t "scene-compliant"—they broke playback on too many devices. rick and morty s01e06 libvpx

In "Rick Potion #9," Rick creates a solution (the love potion) that mutates into a problem (the Cronenberg plague). He doesn’t cure the plague; he abandons the dimension. The solution to broken reality is finding a better copy of reality .

But just as Morty has to live with the psychic weight of knowing his new parents aren’t his "real" parents, the archivist lives with the weight of knowing an x264 re-encode has lost information. A scene with heavy grain (Rick’s portal fluid shimmering) or fast motion (the horde of Cronenbergs rushing the house) will never look as good as the original libvpx source. Rick would approve

The libvpx problem mirrored this. The solution to a broken video file wasn’t to fix the codec; it was to abandon the libvpx source and find a better copy—an x264 encode from a different release group, or a re-encode from the Blu-ray.

You’d try to play it in QuickTime. Nothing. You’d try Windows Media Player. Green screen. You’d install VLC, and it would stutter every time the Cronenberg monsters moved, because VLC’s software VP9 decoder in 2015 wasn’t great. You’d spend an hour learning how to use ffmpeg to transcode it to x264, losing quality in the process. The replacement Summer pours cereal just as well

If you mention S01E06 to a certain kind of fan—the kind who ran a Plex server on a Raspberry Pi, the kind who argued on Reddit about bitrates, the kind who knew the difference between a WebRip and a Web-DL—they will not immediately talk about Cronenbergs or Jessica’s dance. They will squint and say, "Was that the libvpx episode?"