Lagarith

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File Format
Name Lagarith
Ontology
Released 2004

Lagarith by Ben Greenwood is a lossless video codec that offers better compression than codecs like Huffyuv, Alparysoft, and CorePNG. There are a few lossless codecs that can compress better than Lagarith, such as MSU and FFV1; however Lagarith tends to be faster than these codecs.

FourCC: LAGS

Lagarith is able to operate in several colorspaces - RGB24, RGB32, RGBA, YUY2, and YV12

Lagarith is able to outperform Huffyuv due to the fact that it uses a much better compression method. Pixel values are first predicted using median prediction (the same method used when "Predict Median" is selected in Huffyuv). This results in a much more compressible data stream. In Huffyuv, this byte stream would then be compress using Huffman compression. In Lagarith, the byte stream may be subjected to a modified Run Length Encoding if it will result in better compression. The resulting byte stream from that is then compressed using Arithmetic compression, which, unlike Huffman compression, can average fractional bits per symbol. This allows the compressed size to be very close to the entropy of the data, and is why Lagarith can compress simple frames much better than Huffyuv, and avoid expanding high static video. Additionally, Lagarith has support for null frames; if the previous frame is mathematically identical to the current, the current frame is discarded and the decoder will simply use the previous frame again.


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