[FFmpeg-user] Good Free Prediction Algorithms

[Leo Izen]

I noticed that the only good lossless video out there is H.264 4:4:4
Predictive Profile, which has huge patent issues. No matter how high I set
the bitrate, I can see obvious compression artifacts with libvpx, and theora
takes an enormous bitrate to make it seem virtually lossless. There are free
codecs like ffv1 and snow which pretty much have died due to lack of
support. What caught my eye was huffyuv: lossless, and free (specification
is here http://multimedia.cx/huffyuv.txt). The only issue that it had was
that it used simple intra-only prediction.

According to the spec, it uses simple intra-only prediction. This seems nice
in terms of speed but isn't as nice in terms of compression ratio. I'm
looking for a better FREE (emphasis on FREE) prediction algorithm,
preferable inter-prediction. If anybody knows one please reply. Don't send
me ones encumbered by patents. I need one that is FREE. Free as in free
software and free as in freedom. I am thinking of revising the huffyuv spec
and creating a new codec for a new algorithm, one with better prediction,
and maybe using markov coding instead of huffman (or both, depending on how
much better using both makes it). My thinking behind markov is that zlib is
LZ+Huffman and lzma is LZ+Markov, and lzma is way better than zlib.