Lossless video encoders

[dreamkatcha]

Have you noticed that development of nearly all of the above has been discontinued? Some codecs haven't had an update for a decade or two. What's going on and does it really matter? Maybe they reached a point where they can't be improved and no compatibility adjustments are required to continue functioning. I wouldn't know, I'm not a programmer to put it lightly.

I only started giving it some thought recently because the Lagarith codec I've been using for ages no longer seems to be reliable and others don't like WinUAE at all (e.g. the Xvid one - that just displays a frozen config window). I get jarring, scratchy sound glitches and laggy performance, which I suspect relates to the HD recording. This is very resource intensive obviously, but even so, hasn't been an issue before. I tweaked all the usual sound settings with no improvement so that's not it. I'm using the current version of WinUAE which I upgraded to because I was experiencing the same issues with the previous release. It shouldn't be a hardware issue - I'm running an I5, Nvidia GX1050 GPU, 40GB RAM.

I need to do some tests without recording when I get back to my own computer. That would rule out the codec issue.

[Foebane]

I've used TechSmith Screen Capture Codec in the past with the default settings, produces great results, but is not lossless and the resulting files need to be processed with ffmpeg, but then they work very well, at least for me.

Once I've recorded the files, I use this command on ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i output.avi -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 20 -c:a aac -b:a 160k -vf format=yuv420p done.mp4

[Rotareneg]

Ut Video or MagicYUV would be a much better choice than Lagarith these days.

[dreamkatcha]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I tried the TechSmith codec a while back, but was told that it can only be used in conjunction with their screen capture software, Camtasia, so gave up on that one. Since you mentioned them I've looked into it again and now realise that Camtasia comes with two codecs and one of them can be deployed in 3rd party software (as you said). I wish I'd known that before.

Anyway, yeah, it works fantastically well for me too. It may not be lossless, but when the difference is imperceptible to the eye, it hardly matters. The video files produced are a fraction of the size too so much more manageable for editing.

What I was doing before was producing massive files encoded with the Lagarith codec, editing these, and then crunching down the equally cumbersome result using H.264. The outcome was files small enough to be practical for uploading with no noticeable drop in quality. Miraculous really.

I don't know what caused this system to stop working for me. It doesn't matter now anyhow, given that your way is better. I've found that recording from within WinUAE produces higher quality video than using a separate screen capture app so it's good that I can continue doing that.

What I liked about the Lagarith lossless codec is that it allowed me to crop and upscale without producing artefacts. Hopefully I'll have the same experience with the TSSC codec using the top quality option. The lossless aspect in itself doesn't ultimately matter, only in that the fidelity seems to filter through to the crunched final movie.

I did manage to get UT Video and MagicYUV to cooperate with WinUAE, but the file sizes were ridiculous. Within seconds it was spitting out multiple 2GB files, which is crazy even judging by Lagarith standards. I noticed the UT codec features many variants with slightly different names, which all show up in WinUAE with separate entries. I have no idea what the difference between them is and only tried one of them.