Good quality for the episode (~55 min) without bloated file size.
"The Hand of the Sisterhood" is a dense, world-building exercise that prioritizes internal politics over external action. It asks a central question: By the end of the episode, the libvpx-encoded shadows of Wallach IX leave the viewer certain that for Valya Harkonnen, the price of survival is one she is more than willing to pay.
If it falls back to software decoding, your GPU likely lacks VP9 hardware support (pre-2016 Intel GPUs, old AMD/NVIDIA).
mpv --hwdec=vaapi --gpu-context=wayland episode_vp9.mkv
Expected output for a libvpx encode: codec_name=vp9 , pix_fmt=yuv420p or yuv420p10le .
Here’s a technical and practical guide to in relation to libvpx (the open-source VP8/VP9 video codec library), focused on encoding, playback, and troubleshooting.
Season 1, Episode 1 ("The Hand of the Sisterhood"), we must look past the technical "libvpx" file format—which is simply an open-source video codec—and focus on how the episode establishes the foundations of the Bene Gesserit.