Best Video Codec for Screencast or Line Animation

Xah Lee, 2012-07-19

In around 1995, i worked with QuickTime animation. The movies i need to generate are illustration for math. See examples here: Hypotrochoid.

They are line animations. The codec i've found best is Animation code and Graphics codec. Both are lossless. They are part of QuickTime.

Here's a description:

• Animation: Best for animation, computer-generated video, and sequences of screen images; decompresses faster than the graphics codec.
• Graphics: Good alternative to animation when smaller file sizes are important; like animation, is a lossless compression so no image quality is sacrificed as part of the compression step.

Here's what Wikipedia Animation codec say:

The Animation codec is a fast[citation needed] and lossless (if encoded at 100% quality) Quicktime video codec created by Apple Computer to enable playback of RGB video in real time without expensive hardware. It supports color depths from 1 to 32 bits, and is one of the few video codecs that supports an alpha channel. The Animation codec uses run-length encoding for compression, and as such works well for traditional 2-D animation where there are large areas of constant color, or have little change of pixels frame to frame (like screencast). For complex 3D rendered scenes or digitized film of real-world footage, it barely compresses at all and can also add visible noise at lower than 100% quality levels. It is also known by the acronym qtrle in ffmpeg, and its fourCC is ‘rle ‘. It was also declared the “winner” of a recent screencast codec shootout[1]. It is available in the FFMpeg codec suite.

They are still supported in QuickTime player, but now QuickTime X does not seem to support saving movies using these codecs.

What's my best options for resaving these type of animation with today's video tech?

Best Codec for Line Animation and Screencast

This person did a detailed comparison of ≈30 codecs, each with high/mid/low compression settings.

• Screencast codec showdown! (Because cameras aren't the only thing videos are recorded with) 2006-12-08 By Peter Hosey. @ boredzo.org…

He starts with a 426.6 MiB uncompressed video file of a computer screen recording.

For Best Video Quality

For best video quality, the best 3 are:

• Animation 16-bit High: 24.9 MiB
• Animation 32-bit Low: 32 MiB
• JPEG-2000 Medium: 46.2 MiB

… All three of these look about the same. So Animation 16-bit high wins.

Considering Video Quality over Size

Quote:

The next four, in continued declining order of quality, are:

• MPEG-4 High: 18.5 MiB
• Pixlet High: 31.6 MiB
• Sorenson 3 High: 8.7 MiB
• H.264 Medium: 2.4 MiB

If you absolutely must serve up a small file, then H.264 medium is the way to go.

Note: H.264 at High didn't make any difference in video quality.

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6785821/is-there-a-good-open-codec-for-screencast-compression.