I am skeptical of the quality claims without evidence. Previous third-party studies on VP8 and VP9 have said that both H.264 and HEVC (formerly H.265) outperform VP9 on video quality and encoding speed[1].
Table VI. Encoding Run Times for Equal PSNR_{YUV}, HEVC vs. VP9 (in %): 735.2
I.e., HM is over 7x slower than VP9's slowest settings. VP9 speeds have improved dramatically since then, and it is now being used real-time (Google is working on adding it to WebRTC), while still demonstrating significant quality improvements over prior generations.
In my experience h265 and vp9 are fairly close in encoding speeds (less than 0.1x times the length of video duration).
I would strongly argue that h264 can ever outperform vp9 in video quality (given same number of bits), however, hardware/browser support will decide whether vp9 is adopted or not.
It's still H.265. Like past standards, HEVC/H.265 is a joint effort between ISO's MPEG and the ITU's VCEG. They're different identifiers for different organizations.
Table VI. Encoding Run Times for Equal PSNR_{YUV}, HEVC vs. VP9 (in %): 735.2
I.e., HM is over 7x slower than VP9's slowest settings. VP9 speeds have improved dramatically since then, and it is now being used real-time (Google is working on adding it to WebRTC), while still demonstrating significant quality improvements over prior generations.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329580 w.r.t. the quality aspect.