Difference between revisions of "Lossless and lossy"

From VideoLAN Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
m (→‎Lossy Codecs: Change wikilink from Codec to Video codec)
(→‎Lossless Codecs: Add Mmwiki category links)
 
(One intermediate revision by the same user not shown)
Line 4: Line 4:
  
 
==Lossless Codecs==
 
==Lossless Codecs==
 +
{{Mmwiki|Category:Lossless Video Codecs|Category:Lossless Audio Codecs}}
 
* [[WAVE]] (WAVE is technically a container format, but usually contains lossless PCM audio.)
 
* [[WAVE]] (WAVE is technically a container format, but usually contains lossless PCM audio.)
 
* [[FLAC]]
 
* [[FLAC]]

Latest revision as of 05:22, 16 May 2019

Lossless is a way of compressing data which is fully reversible, i.e., does not "throw away" data. A losslessly compressed file can be used to create an exact copy of the source file.

Lossy is the opposite of lossless. A certain amount of data is discarded; how much is usually dependent upon a quality or bit rate setting of the codec. This makes the file (or stream) much smaller that lossless compression, but reduces the quality. It is impossible to transcode from one lossy format to another without further degrading quality.

Lossless Codecs

  • WAVE (WAVE is technically a container format, but usually contains lossless PCM audio.)
  • FLAC
  • WavPack
  • HuffYUV video codec

Lossy Codecs