Because nostalgia for the early 2010s piracy scene is now a subculture. And within that subculture, "Rick Potion #9" is a shibboleth.
"Rick Potion #9" is often cited as the episode where Rick and Morty stopped being just a vulgar Back to the Future parody and became a existential horror show wrapped in burping catchphrases. It’s the episode that ends with the Smith family shattered, a planet Cronenberged, and Rick casually abandoning Dimension C-137 for a replacement reality.
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?" rick and morty s01e06 libvpx
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.
Wubba lubba dub dub.
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.
In the early 2010s, the digital distribution landscape was fragmented. Adult Swim’s official streaming apps and website used adaptive bitrate streaming. For high-efficiency playback, they often encoded their library in VP9 via libvpx. This was a smart, forward-thinking choice: smaller file sizes, no licensing fees, decent quality at low bandwidth. Because nostalgia for the early 2010s piracy scene
These are the battle scars of the digital dark age.