capturing from VCR and encoding in 2020.

[dellsam34]

For some reason I had assumed he was talking about lossy because I never mentioned uncompressed in post #27, Thanks for the correction.

[johnmeyer]

@dellsam34, johnmeyer was questioning UNCOMPRESSED vs lossless, not lossy vs lossless.

Yes, Scott understood perfectly what I was asking.

Since you are unlikely to ship uncompressed video files around to lots of people, not forcing them to find and install a codec is probably not an issue, although Scott is 100% correct that it is an advantage for uncompressed video.

I am not sure that the speed of encoding or decoding would be an issue, although I have never tried to capture 4K or even HD video to an uncompressed file. Since lossless codecs, by definition, do not use any interframe compression, and since having to look at adjacent frames is what makes encoding using lossy codecs like h.264 so CPU-intensive, I don't think this is much of an issue. I don't know what sort of compression algorithms are used in HuffYUV, Lagarith, and other lossless compression schemes.

I do vaguely remember having issues with the lack of alpha channel, but most of the time I don't care about that, and I'm not sure how many people expect or need that feature.

[Cornucopia]

BTW, "surprise!" it IS possible to have lossless codecs that use interframe compression. They just have to also store their motion vector error residual in addition to the motion vectors. Can't remember off the top of my head which codecs do this, but they're out there.

Scott

[jagabo]

x264 and x265 both support lossless encdoding with interframe compression. And Lagarith has the simplest form of interframe compression, null frames (repeat last frame) -- of course, that won't help with analog video capture where no two frames will be identical (except when a prior frame is substituted for a dropped frame).