Lagarith Lossless Video Codec

Lagarith Lossless Video Codec is a steady and efficient video codec suited mostly for editing and archiving. It aims to offer better compression than most codecs out there, with an emphasis on speedy encoding times.

It is built on-top of Huffyuv (although some algorithms have been taken from AviSynth), another lossless video codec that was designed to operate in several color spaces, much in the same way as Lagarith.

Despite Lagarith being a tad slower than Huffyuv, it still manages to exceed the performance of other lossless codecs in what encoding times are concerned.

However, the main difference between the two is dictated by the performance of the compression level. This is where Lagarith outgrows Huffyuv, by achieving an arithmetic compression algorithm based on Run Length Encoding instead of the Huffman method that the latter uses. This favors a much more qualitative output, obviously.

Lagarith was built with great attention for the color-space conversions, featuring support for YV12, YUY2, RGB24, RGB32 and RGB, attempting to eliminate the rounding errors that are common in video editing.

The fact that each frame of a video will be decoded separately means that inter-prediction will be avoided, making common operations such as joining, cutting or seeking much easier and comfortable. Other highlights include support for null frames and multithreading.

Lagarith Lossless Video Codec seems like an appropriate choice for users who are dealing with advanced video editing, being suited for use anywhere, due to its open source license.