Lagarith
Encyclopedia
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
lossless video codec
Video codec
A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video. The compression usually employs lossy data compression. Historically, video was stored as an analog signal on magnetic tape...
written by Ben Greenwood. It was designed and written with a few aims in mind:
Speed: while not as fast as Huffyuv
Huffyuv
Huffyuv is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format.Despite the "YUV" in the name, it does not compress the YUV color space, but YCbCr...
, it still outperforms most other lossless video codecs when it comes to encoding times, although decoding speed may be slower. Recent versions also support parallelizing on multi-processor systems.
Color-space support: color-space conversions can cause rounding errors, introducing data loss, contrary to the ideal of lossless video compression. Lagarith attempts to avoid this problem by supporting YV12, YUY2, RGB, and RGBA
RGBA color space
RGBA stands for Red Green Blue Alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually simply a use of the RGB color model, with extra information. The color is RGB, and may belong to any RGB color space, but an integral alpha value as invented by Catmull and Smith between 1971 and...
colorspaces.
Keyframes: disallowing inter-prediction means that each frame can be separately decoded. This makes cutting, joining and seeking much easier.
These three things, as well as being more efficient at compression than Huffyuv, make it a codec useful for the video editing stage.