Why Compress?

[p4progress]

I am brand new to video capture and VCD creation, so I have a basic question: Assuming one has the necessary hardware to permit capture to disk with no compression, is there any advantage to using a codec such as HuffyUV to capture video? I know that HuffyUV is supposed to be lossless, but I swear I get better results when I capture with no compression. The only rationale I can think of for using it is to save on disk space. Any comments? Thanks!

[AntnyMD]

Thats your answer, to save space. Also, older computers with drives spinning under 7200rpm will tend to drop fewer or no frames.

[PigOnWing]

I'll be so bold as to take AntnyMD's (excellent and) concise answer, and just elaborate on it a bit further:

As you capture, the captured data is written to disk.
As it's written to disk, besides the space it occupies, it needs to be written alongside the capture, so that the next 'chunk' of capture data could be further written to disk.

If you're capturing lossless, that could mean as much as 18MB per second. That's 18 MB of data to be transferred and written to your HD.

If you're compressing, it first and foremost means less data transfer.

If your HD can cope with 18MB/s, great. If it can't, go to AntnyMD's answer, and you'll learn that you'll lose data (= dropped frames). If you compress it, your HD will thank you with a big smile on its face. Spin. Head. Whatever.

-- Piggie

[p4progress]

Thanks for all your help. I'm glad it's just an issue of disk space. There is one thing that puzzles me however... and that is there appears to be a discernable loss of quality in using HuffyUV, a supposedly lossless form of compression. When I play back the AVI file on my computer that was captured with compression, it looks worse than without. In both cases there are no lost frames. Perhaps it's just the playback of the compressed AVI that is affected and the quality differences will disappear when I run them through TMPEnc to convert to MPEG-1. Do you have any ideas why I am seeing a quality difference (at the AVI level) with "lossless" compression? I appreciate all comments.