h264 lossless coding

Question

Is it possible to do completely lossless encoding in h264? By lossless, I mean that if I feed it a series of frames and encode them, and then if I extract all the frames fro

Answer 1

If you can't get lossless compression using a h.264 encoder and decoder, perhaps you could look into two alternatives:

(1) Rather than passing all the data in h.264 format, some people are experimenting with transmitting some of the data with a residual "side channel":

• (h.264 file) -> h264 decode -> some transformation -> a lossy approximation of the original series of bitmaps
• (compressed residual file) --> decoder -> a series of lossless residual bitmaps
• For each pixel in each bitmap, approximate_pixel + residual_pixel = a pixel bit-for-bit equal to the original pixel.

(2) Use Dirac video compression format in "lossless" mode.