Video compression without the need for playback

[david_werecat]

My brother asked me an interesting question recently. He asked if there was any video compression software to make videos smaller without the need to be able to play them while in the compressed format. If the videos are unplayable in the compressed format, there should be gains to the compression ratio. I was wondering if anyone has heard of any programs which can do this. Thanks in advance.

[m^2]

Lossy or lossless?
I doubt you'll find anything like this in lossy space. Well, maybe 1 thing, experimental codecs meant to be used on future hardware. I've heard that something meant to replace h264 works great, but has huge requirements for playback.
When it comes to lossless, this field is severely underdeveloped.
There is a Dell codec written by Przemysław Skibiński somewhere on this forum that takes MPEG2 video and reencodes losslessly. There were talks about similar codecs for h264, but I don't think anybody wrote it.
When it comes to general lossless codecs, YULS is *probably* the strongest codec out there. Hard to tell since I haven't seen any good comparison that would be newer than 2007...Maybe I missed something, but there's really little happening in this space.

[Shelwien]

To be specific, its http://encode.su/threads/1111-Ocarin...deo-compressor
Also there's my avi preprocessor: http://nishi.dreamhosters.com/u/avip_v0.rar

> If the videos are unplayable in the compressed format, there should be gains to the compression ratio

Afaik that makes nearly no difference (playable or not).
Surely, being able to apply multiple tools (like demux and process audio/video/index/subtitles) separately
would make programming easier, but the only thing that really affects compression is the block size
(aka distance between key frames) and the difference is insignificant (something like 3% between
full solid and reasonable blocks for convenient seek support).
In fact the playback is rather slow - around 300KB per second seems like a fairly good quality,
so we can even apply strong CMs there, and it would be still playable.
Basically, there won't be anybody willing to use compression which is slower than video playback,
so there's no sense to separate them.

[david_werecat]

Thanks for the suggestions! Maybe sometime in the future I'll work on my own video compressor... although my last try resulted in somewhat higher compression and slightly less quality loss then MJPEG.

[jethro]

This reminds me of RatDVD, a DVD backup solution (sort of). You can check out FluxDVD which is still active and has many features.

[m^2]

To be specific, its http://encode.su/threads/1111-Ocarin...deo-compressor
Also there's my avi preprocessor: http://nishi.dreamhosters.com/u/avip_v0.rar

> If the videos are unplayable in the compressed format, there should be gains to the compression ratio

Afaik that makes nearly no difference (playable or not).
Surely, being able to apply multiple tools (like demux and process audio/video/index/subtitles) separately
would make programming easier, but the only thing that really affects compression is the block size
(aka distance between key frames) and the difference is insignificant (something like 3% between
full solid and reasonable blocks for convenient seek support).
In fact the playback is rather slow - around 300KB per second seems like a fairly good quality,
so we can even apply strong CMs there, and it would be still playable.
Basically, there won't be anybody willing to use compression which is slower than video playback,
so there's no sense to separate them.

Archival and backup. Maybe distribution (thought savings would have to be good). Those don't need real time playback.

[nicole_wong]

Hi dear experts, I am new with video compression, thus need your help! I dont know where can I post and I see this thread looks similar on what I am finding.

I'm currently doing on a research that allow me to find a software that helps me to compress my video with different kinds of format like H.264, the software must be able to show me the ratios as well as the PSNR too.

I have tried searching for different softwares in the web, but couldnt find one that show me the ratios or PSNR, please help me! Thank you!

Cheers,
Nicole

[osmanturan]

Why don't you compute compression ratio and PSNR by yourself!? It's not that hard. With VFW API, you can read any video files which have supported drivers installed on your system. If that's not an option for you, you can at least write a MATLAB script easily.

[Shelwien]

http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Stats_Output