Any 2021 lossless video comparison?

[PCU]

Any unbiased 2021 lossless video comparison?
Maximum compression is the most important thing for me.

[richardpl]

lagarith

[PCU]

Originally Posted by richardpl

lagarith

Even better than YULS?

[Zarxrax]

I have also been looking for recent comparisons but not found anything.
Purely from a size standpoint (for example, to archive footage), I have found x264 to be significantly smaller than any of the typical lossless codecs. I have not tried an HEVC encoder, but it could potentially be even smaller.
x264 is also hard to beat from a speed standpoint. I only saw about 12% size difference between veryfast and veryslow presets.
If you are willing to accept some minor loss (still visually lossless) you can set the crf to around 10 and cut the size to 1/3 of the lossless version.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

I have also been looking for recent comparisons but not found anything.
Purely from a size standpoint (for example, to archive footage), I have found x264 to be significantly smaller than any of the typical lossless codecs. I have not tried an HEVC encoder, but it could potentially be even smaller.
x264 is also hard to beat from a speed standpoint. I only saw about 12% size difference between veryfast and veryslow presets.
If you are willing to accept some minor loss (still visually lossless) you can set the crf to around 10 and cut the size to 1/3 of the lossless version.

Have you tried AV1 lossless so far?

[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by PCU

Have you tried AV1 lossless so far?

No but it might be a bit smaller. For me speed is at least semi-important so I was good with x264. If you really want small size, I think its worth considering making just a very high quality encode rather than insisting on purely lossless content, as ultimately no one will be able to tell the difference as long as quality is sufficiently high.

[PCU]

Active lossless video formats:
FFV1
MagicYUV
x264 (not recommended)
x265
AV1
JPEG XS
Motion JPEG 2000 (MainConcept)
VC-2
UT Video Codec Suite

Why does no one fork CorePNG? (better rename to MPNG (Motion PNG)
CorePNG is a very attractive project.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

No but it might be a bit smaller. For me speed is at least semi-important so I was good with x264. If you really want small size, I think its worth considering making just a very high quality encode rather than insisting on purely lossless content, as ultimately no one will be able to tell the difference as long as quality is sufficiently high.

I prefer lossless, but the size is the most important thing for me:
source: 35 MB, lossless: MagicYUV/PCM 7.5 GB!
Length: 2.30 min!

[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by PCU

Active lossless video formats:

Why does no one fork CorePNG? (better rename to MPNG (Motion PNG)
CorePNG is a very attractive project.

PNG is a very old technology. Modern formats like AV1 should easily outperform it.

Also, if size is the biggest concern, you need a codec that makes heavy use of temporal compression. X264, X265, or AV1. Codecs like MagicYUV, UTvideo, Corepng, etc are primarily designed with every frame being a keyframe, and this will be SIGNIFICANTLY larger in filesize.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

PNG is a very old technology. Modern formats like AV1 should easily outperform it.

Also, if size is the biggest concern, you need a codec that makes heavy use of temporal compression. X264, X265, or AV1. Codecs like MagicYUV, UTvideo, Corepng, etc are primarily designed with every frame being a keyframe, and this will be SIGNIFICANTLY larger in filesize.

My question is that apart from the color space being lost in the conversion, is the x265 really like FLAC?

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...I-can-prove-it

So here's the deal, currently have a GTX960 and decided to buy mini1050 for $115 when payday comes around. In preparation of this change I have been doing a bunch of tests of the GTX960's nvenc as a baseline to compare how the Pascal powered 1050 performs quality wise, namely I wanted to see if the 1050 offered better quality because it executes the same settings better, is it because it offers more settings than the 960 or both.

So using a static build of ffmpeg and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and the latest NVIDIA drivers I transcoded a slew of files and used ffmpeg to calculate baseline PSNR and SSIM values. As a reference point I decided to include some x264 ultrafast and medium encodes and some x265 ultrafast encodes, it was when I decided to do a bunch of lossless encodes that I realized something was wrong.

Using a 2.3gb 1080p source file I transcoded it to nvenc_h264 lossless (the 960 doesn't support H265 lossless) and the resulting files size was 30.9gb.

The x264 ultra fast lossless was 28.6gb, with the medium preset it drops down to about 22gb. Then I ran into something really odd, the x265 ultra fast encode was only 14gb, less than half the size of the other 2.

Using ffmpeg to caluclate PSNR and SSIM for all the files i got the following values:

NVENC H264 Lossless
[Parsed_ssim_0 @ 0x27956a0] SSIM Y:1.000000 (inf) U:1.000000 (inf) V:1.000000 (inf) All:1.000000 (inf)

[Parsed_psnr_1 @ 0x2795d40] PSNR y:inf u:inf v:inf average:inf min:inf max:inf

X264 Lossless Ultra Fast
[Parsed_ssim_0 @ 0x37958a0] SSIM Y:1.000000 (97.759916) U:1.000000 (inf) V:1.000000 (inf) All:1.000000 (99.656556)

[Parsed_psnr_1 @ 0x3796040] PSNR y:inf u:inf v:inf average:inf min:inf max:inf

X265 Lossless Ultra Fast
[Parsed_ssim_0 @ 0x4133a40] SSIM Y:0.996310 (24.329467) U:0.997240 (25.590147) V:0.997184 (25.503329) All:0.996610 (24.698549)
[Parsed_psnr_1 @ 0x41340e0] PSNR y:53.354600 u:55.613567 v:55.443195 average:53.965527 min:51.749530 max:72.329853

The only values that make sense are the NVENC Lossless values, SSIM has a range between -1 and 1, with -1 being completely different and 1 being exactly the same and the decibel value for both PSNR and SSIM should be infinite if the encode is truly lossless.

Even x264 isn't really lossless but it's close enough that we can let it slide but the x265 values really surprise me.

Anyone want to run similar test with x265 on test samples they have and see if they see similar results.

For the record, lossless encoding for x264 and x265 where done with CRF 0.

[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by PCU

My question is that apart from the color space being lost in the conversion, is the x265 really like FLAC?

Per the thread you linked, people responded that the wrong settings were used.

I just did my own test in x265 and it did turn out completely mathematically lossless.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

Per the thread you linked, people responded that the wrong settings were used.

I just did my own test in x265 and it did turn out completely mathematically lossless.

What about this comparison, says x264 is not that good in compression, correct me if I'm wrong:

https://compression.ru/video/codec_c...n_2007_eng.pdf

[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by PCU

What about this comparison, says x264 is not that good in compression, correct me if I'm wrong:

https://compression.ru/video/codec_c...n_2007_eng.pdf

That was a very old version of x264 now. There were numerous improvements to lossless encoding after that, including revision 994 which was said to improve lossless encoding by 4-25%.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

That was a very old version of x264 now. There were numerous improvements to lossless encoding after that, including revision 994 which was said to improve lossless encoding by 4-25%.

That's why we need new unbiased comparison!

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

Per the thread you linked, people responded that the wrong settings were used.

I just did my own test in x265 and it did turn out completely mathematically lossless.

What settings do you use for maximum compression?

[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by PCU

What settings do you use for maximum compression?

Dunno, I haven't played with it much aside from just checking if I got lossless output. I would guess the speed setting is the most important thing after the --lossless option.

[PCU]

Originally Posted by Zarxrax

Dunno, I haven't played with it much aside from just checking if I got lossless output. I would guess the speed setting is the most important thing after the --lossless option.

What software do you use?
I'm a pro user of MainConcept codecs, but noob user of x264/x265, because IDK anything about it beside main settings!

[poisondeathray]

Originally Posted by PCU

Even x264 isn't really lossless but it's close enough that we can let it slide but the x265 values really surprise me.

Then there is some user error somewhere. Such as timestamps off or jitter, or not using --lossless switch for x265 (crf 0 is not lossless for x265)


What pixel format ?
What type of content ?

For 8bit 4:2:0, it will be x264 or ffv1 using long gop

Long GOP will almost always produce better results, so that rules out things like lagarith. The exception will be null frames. Content that has lots of identical frames. Lagarith "null frames" option will put it over the top

[PCU]

Originally Posted by poisondeathray

Then there is some user error somewhere. Such as timestamps off or jitter, or not using --lossless switch for x265 (crf 0 is not lossless for x265)


What pixel format ?
What type of content ?

For 8bit 4:2:0, it will be x264 or ffv1 using long gop

Long GOP will almost always produce better results, so that rules out things like lagarith. The exception will be null frames. Content that has lots of identical frames. Lagarith "null frames" option will put it over the top

I just want max compression for lossless, --lossless is enough?

[poisondeathray]

Originally Posted by PCU

I just want max compression for lossless, --lossless is enough?

For x265 --lossless enables lossless mode. Anything else is not lossless .

Slower settings do not always reduce filesze, it depends on content. eg. You can demonstrate cases where "very slow" produces larger file than "very fast". There is no "max compression" setting for everything

But x265 always produces worse compression ratio than x264 for 8bit 4:2:0 content lossless encoding - there is not a single test in thousands that show otherwise (when using similar settings, not something like intra. vs long gop) . There is no reason to use x265 lossless - slower to encode/decode, larger filesizes

Your PSNR/SSIM tests look not done correctly (likely timestamp issue, or container timebase differences if it doesn't show "inf")