[MPlayer-users] lossless codecs make bigger files than raw DV ?!

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 05:22:10PM +0100, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:
> I am trying to encode DV (from dvgrab) capture files to a lossless
> video/audio format for storage. What is the best format?
> 
> I have tried to encode to huffyuv but the resulting file is MUCH larger
> than the source file:
> 
> mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:format=422P:acodec=mp3 file.dv2 -o file.huffyuv
> 
> file.dv2 is 1.4G and file.huffyuv is around 3.8G. How come?

Um, duh, why wouldn't it be??? If you want to archive your DV files
losslessly, don't decompress them and then compress them with a
lossless codec. That's utter nonsense. Leave them as-is, or you can
try gzip or bzip2 for maybe 1-2% additional compression, but IMO
that's not worth the loss of convenience.

Rich