Lossless PAL AVI

[Quickhare]

Ok, kind of newbie here, so forgive me if I ask a question that seems basic. I have searched the forums and came up with no answers to my question, so I thought I'd ask and get some expert opinions back. Here goes...


I have a movie which is generated by my computer. It's not a DVD rip, downloaded content or rip of any other kind. In order to work on it further (some editing before DVD burning), I wish to put it together as an AVI file for lossless storage. Oh, and the video file will have no sound.

When I created the AVI file uncompressed, it was about 3.5Gb big, which is a little more than expected. Now I need this file lossless, so I looked around for codecs which would do it. The one that seems to have jumped out at me so far is the Indeo 5 as a quality of 100 (I assume % of original size). This compressed it to 350Mb or thereabouts, which is great.


Now I know you lot are reading this, some people with open mouths and thinking "What is he trying to do?!", so I'll get a little more to the point:
Is there a codec out there which is for AVI, lossless, gives remarkable compression rates, audio support optional (as I said, no sound is recorded anyway) and free? Is the Indeo 5 codec set to 100 lossless?

I am not bothered about playback processing power or compression timings as this is during production, not playing on end-user's machines/players.


Cheers for any help.

[CWR03]

HuffYUV might work for you. Indeo, even at 100%, is not "lossless."

[Quickhare]

I tried that one. I have 2.1.1, and the output file seemed no different to the uncompressed file in terms of size... I was using Predict Median and Predict Gradient with no other tickboxes ticked (the default) for HuffYUV. Any suggestions?

[Guest]

Truly lossless codecs will not give you much compression, usually a factor of 2-3. No lossless codec is going to give you "remarkable compression rates".

Consider a frame serving solution, so that you can avoid the intermediate file.

[AVIL]

Hi,

You can also try lagarith or MSU lossless coded. Perhaps this last codec with max compression settings can serve. But is slooow (coding and decoding). Lagarith is a good compromise between compression and speed. With luck you can obtain a file less than 1GB.

Good luck.

[Quickhare]

Avil:

Thanks for that one. I managed to compress my 7.4Gb (uncompressed) video into 277Mb with the Lagarith. I chose that one as I was reading how it makes use of the null frames, which is perfect for the type of video I had. And it was amazingly fast, too. Almost real-time (ie, I wait 4mins for movie to play, 4mins to encode it!). I've yet to try the MSU codec, but it's all looking promising.

Thanks to everyone for their input on this. I sadly cannot avoid the intermediate video file, but so far it seems I can do this much easier now.

Cheers!