I often have to write up specs for video conversion for some of the video production houses that my company's clients work with. Unfortunately, I am a programmer first and "video-guy" on the side, so I don't know too much about all the different codecs.
I am looking for a good lossless codec that is both cross-platform (Win and Mac) and cross application (Adobe, Apple, etc).
huffyuv is definitely the simplest solution and you will find several cross-platform implementations as C libraries for example.
It is easily encapsulated in AVI files and readable by the major players.
Format definition if you need to interact with it: http://multimedia.cx/huffyuv.txt
Mathematically lossless, or output exactly equal to input:
x264 using --qp 0. Easily 1/3 of huffyuv all times.
Visually lossless, or difficult to distinguish output from input: x264 with quantizer 1-5 or even up to 10. 1-5 is so visually lossless that flaws aren't apparent even after strong sharpening.
The (schroedinger) dirac encoder supports lossless compression much more effective than huffyuv and is supported by GStreamer and libav. In GStreamer the option is rate-control=3 for schroedinger:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin2 name=demux \
{ matroskamux name=mux ! filesink location="$2" } \
{ demux. ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc quality=0.5 ! queue ! mux. } \
{ demux. ! queue ! schroenc rate-control=3 ! mux. }
There are a few different codecs that will do cross platform.
Cineform is a good one. It has both a 444 version and a RAW version.
If you don't care about space taken and realtime playback, you could use an image sequence.
Apple Pro-res can now be read on both Mac and PC. However, encoding cannot be done by PCs.
Do you mean visually lossless or lossless?
Just a quick ten-years-later-answer:
x265 allows this with the --lossless parameter :)
If you want mathematically lossless I would suggest something like Motion JPEG2000, which has a lossless compression option, but it doesn't have the broad support in editing applications.
If you want support between Apple's Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier I would use uncompressed 444 if you are doing any compositing, or 422 if you aren't.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/768999/what-is-a-good-lossless-video-codec