MSU Lossless Video Codecs Comparison

• Project head: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
• Testing, charts, analysis: Sergey Grishin
• Translating: Daria Kalinkina
• Verification: Stas Soldatov

See new version of this comparison (March 2007)
Lossless Video Codec Comparison 2007

About comparison

• Number of test sequences: 9
• Number of color spaces considered: 3
  • RGB
  • YUY2
  • YV12
• Number of codecs tested: 15
  1. Alpary v2.0
  2. AVIzlib v2.2.3
  3. CamStudio GZIP v1.0
  4. CorePNG v0.8.2
  5. FFV1 ffdshow 08/08/04
  6. GLZW v1.01
  7. HuffYUV v2.1.1
  8. Lagarith v1.0.0.1
  9. LEAD JPEG v1.0.0.1
  10. LOCO v0.2
  11. MindVid v1.0 beta 1
  12. MSUlab beta v0.2.4
  13. MSUlab v0.5.2
  14. PicVideo JPEG v.2.10.0.29
  15. VBLE beta

Download MSU Lossless Video Codecs Comparison (1.36MB, PDF)

See also:

• Big Codecs Comparison (May 2003)
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Comparison (January 2005)

About the comparison of lossless codecs

The name of this video codec category declares full quality losses absence - the decompressed video stream should be completely identical to original. Output quality is same for all codecs. Absolute absence of losses is a very strong requirement, therefore it is often hard to achieve compression ratios above 3:1. Some of the tested codecs have an opportunity of work in “lossy” mode; it allows to reach considerably higher compression degree with rather small losses of quality. However, only “fully lossless” mode is considered in the current comparison. The only parameter of comparison is the compression level.

Many codecs give an opportunity to adjust the parameter speed/compression ratio; it allows to tune the codec for the specific task (real-time capture or the rendering requiring loss minimization). Only maximum compression ratio result is considered in current work.

Some codecs are capable to accept input data in several color spaces (RGB, YUY2, YV12, etc.), however, compression is not always “lossless”. Some codecs “silently” perform the conversion of color spaces, thus, raising a degree of compression. Quality losses coming out of such conversions are not visible, but surely exist. In the given testing work codecs is compared separately for various color spaces, thus in each color space full absence of losses is guaranteed!

Main parts of the comparison:

1. Information about codecs:
   • Vendor and version
   • Color space support
   • Logo presence in compressed video
   • Registration requirements

   and test sequences:

   • Sequence name
   • Resolution
   • Number of frames
2. Brief codecs description with screenshots
3. Codecs comparison with analysis of compression ratios for each sequence
4. Codecs comparison with analysis of total compression ratios for each codec

Download

• Download MSU Lossless Video Codecs Comparison (1.36MB, PDF)
• Download MSU Lossless Video Codecs Comparison (1.2MB, ZIP)

Contacts

E-mail: video@graphics.cs.msu.ru