New experimental Lossless codec -- needs your help

[TheRealMoh]

Newest version is 004, download below

Note to moderators: I'm posting this here because the code is in need of your help. Although the current code works, it's not ready for wide release. If you feel this thread should be moved, please do so.

I've spent a bunch of time writing a new codec. It's based loosely on the LOCO-I algorithm.

Summary:
- Lossless file size if about 70% of Huffyuv
- lossy can decrease file size another 10-20% percent
- about 1/4 the speed of huffyuv :-<
- Stores YV12 natively
- GPL: (C) 2003 Mohammad Rezaei

TODO:
- Performance.
-- calcLoco can be vectorized. Part of comp_one_pel can be vectorized.
-- riceEncode can not be easily vectorized.
-- unlikely to be made more than 50% faster
- YV12:
-- conversion to YUY2 and RGB after decompression
- interlacing
-- is there a flag indicating interlacing in the incoming images? if so, store it.
-- a quick test showed that unless most of the video is highly combed, it does not make sense to compress fields separetely.

Essentially, I've hit a wall with the code as far as performance goes. You guys are the closest thing I can find to video related performance experts. I need your help in tuning this codec so it can be more useful. I'm not sure how much more time I can spend on this, so if someone wants to take this over, that's fine too.

The project was inspired by the YV12 codec thread in this forum. Feel free to test the codec, but please don't store anything important using this codec: the internals may change.

The code is based on huffyuv and is GPL, so please don't release binary only versions.

Your help is much appreciated.

Edit note: removed loco001.zip, added loco002.zip (small bug fix) down below.