Comment by Dwedit
1 hour ago
One uncommonly used feature of H.264 is support for lossless video. It's a bit hard to use due to tooling (not easy to discover and select the feature), and is sometimes incompatible with web browsers, but you can get actual lossless video using a mainstream video codec. You can verify that it really is lossless, and doesn't have any conversion step where it's quantized to 8-bit YUV.
"x264vfw" is one tool which supports this format, even inside of an AVI file. So older software that uses Video For Windows can create those files.
FYI, both VP9 and AV1 support lossless as part of their base profiles, so lossless files using those codecs should be compatible with all implementations (at least in theory). Though those profiles only support 4:2:0, so it depends on your use case if that really counts as lossless.
I struggle to think of a situation where the blur of chroma subsampling is acceptable but very high quality or prores isn't good enough, I need lossless.
you can easily record lossless h264 via obs and any ffmpeg-backed player will play it just fine
the days where the OS matters for video playback are long gone
What is the purpose of lossless H.264 vs. ProRes or the like?
Is it similar to lossless audio were there's not a ton of optimization you can do?
I've attempted to get researchers to use lossless H.264 to encode CT scans. They typically use directories full of tiffs. Even with intra-slice compression (i.e. tiff compression) they are pretty huge. But H.264 will let you recover the original images to the individual bit, and save a huge amount of space thanks to inter-slice similarities.
They are still using directories of tiff, though.
Lots of hardware requires specifically h.264 as a transit; many of the MPEG standards are built around it. So this lets you get MPEG-PS, or lossless BDs, or some hardware/specialized software decoders for machines that otherwise couldn’t keep up (like set top boxes).
prores is not lossless. It's also an intraframe codec so compression is not great.