Which is least compressed format?

[vid83]

I've read that wmv is a highly compressed file.

Which file type is least compressed of these: .avi, xvid, divx, h264, MPEG-4, wmv? How can you tell?

[zoobie]

by the filesize
but they differ in quality
what's the goal?

[guns1inger]

AVI is a container, so it doesn't count. The rest are all highly compressed formats. If you encode with all of them at the same bitrate, the files will be the same size. Only the quality will differ. The more you squeeze, the bigger the difference. H.264 offers the best quality/size ratio of the list you have, unless you include VC-1 in the WMV category.

[jagabo]

Uncompressed RGB or YUY2 in an AVI file is the least compressed. You need to specify what you are trying to accomplish.

[CogoSWSDS]

Yup. What jagabo said, except that the files will be huge. Video in an .avi that is compressed with a DV codec will take 13GB per hour. Uncompressed RGB or YUY2 will be even bigger. Lagarith or HuffYUV will get you lossless compression but still at a fairly large file size. DV is a lossy compression but unless uncompressed and recompressed several times, you won't notice much difference. The others, however, you will notice a big difference if you re-encode (uncompress and recompress).

CogoSWSDS