What is a good lossless video codec?

Question

I often have to write up specs for video conversion for some of the video production houses that my company's clients work with. Unfortunately, I am a programmer first and "video-guy" on the side, so I don't know too much about all the different codecs.

I am looking for a good lossless codec that is both cross-platform (Win and Mac) and cross application (Adobe, Apple, etc).

Answer 1

huffyuv is definitely the simplest solution and you will find several cross-platform implementations as C libraries for example.

It is easily encapsulated in AVI files and readable by the major players.

Format definition if you need to interact with it: http://multimedia.cx/huffyuv.txt

Answer 2

Mathematically lossless, or output exactly equal to input: x264 using --qp 0. Easily 1/3 of huffyuv all times.

Visually lossless, or difficult to distinguish output from input: x264 with quantizer 1-5 or even up to 10. 1-5 is so visually lossless that flaws aren't apparent even after strong sharpening.

Answer 3

The (schroedinger) dirac encoder supports lossless compression much more effective than huffyuv and is supported by GStreamer and libav. In GStreamer the option is rate-control=3 for schroedinger:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin2 name=demux \
{ matroskamux name=mux ! filesink location="$2" } \
{ demux. ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc quality=0.5 ! queue ! mux. } \
{ demux. ! queue ! schroenc rate-control=3 ! mux. }

Answer 4

There are a few different codecs that will do cross platform.

Cineform is a good one. It has both a 444 version and a RAW version.

If you don't care about space taken and realtime playback, you could use an image sequence.

Apple Pro-res can now be read on both Mac and PC. However, encoding cannot be done by PCs.

Do you mean visually lossless or lossless?

Answer 5

If you want mathematically lossless I would suggest something like Motion JPEG2000, which has a lossless compression option, but it doesn't have the broad support in editing applications.

If you want support between Apple's Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier I would use uncompressed 444 if you are doing any compositing, or 422 if you aren't.