[FFmpeg-user] Is there an equivalent of Drobox Lepton but for h.264 videos?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,
I have no information on how Lepton actually works, but it's presumably making use of redundancy inherent to JPEG which make it possible for lossless compression to reduce their size so dramatically. JPEG is a very old standard, developed at a time of very limited computer resources, and all compression is a compromise of image quality, file size, and computer horsepower.

Conversely, at least some video codecs already use lossless compression such as Huffman and arithmetic coding and it's quite possible that the kind of feature being requested here is more or less already implemented. Main and High profile H.264, HEVC and possibly others use context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding, which is a type of lossless compression. This does more or less what Lepton appears to be doing for JPEGs.

So the answer is that basically, it's already there. It might theoretically be possible to do better by using more computer resources (CPU time, memory, etc) to apply some other or more extensive type of lossless compression, but I would not expect it to be possible to achieve the sort of large gains that Lepton achieves with JPEG, at least with reasonable computer resources.

P