UT Video Codec Suite is a fast,
lossless
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...
video codec
A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...
, developed by and released under the free
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...
. The algorithm of UT video is based on the
Huffman code
In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression. The process of finding or using such a code proceeds by means of Huffman coding, an algori ...
.
UT video was developed as an alternative to
HuffYUV, in order to achieve better compression. It can handle
color spaces
A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital represent ...
such as
YUV422 (ULY2),
RGB
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additiv ...
(ULRG),
RGBA
RGBA stands for red green blue alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually a three-channel RGB color model supplemented with a fourth ''alpha channel''. Alpha indicates how opaque each pixel is and allows an image to ...
(ULRA) and, most recently, YUV420 (ULY0).
It has both
x86 and
x64
x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mo ...
builds. Due to its
multithreading support, this codec is also capable of encoding
HDTV
High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the ...
material in real time. The codec requires support for the
SSE2
SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. It extends the earlier SSE ins ...
instruction set because it is heavily used for speed optimizations.
UT video uses the following
FOURCC
A FourCC ("four-character code") is a sequence of four bytes (typically ASCII) used to uniquely identify data formats. It originated from the OSType or ResType metadata system used in classic Mac OS and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts I ...
codes:
ULY0
,
ULY2
,
ULRA
,
ULRG
.
References
2008 software
Free video codecs
Lossless compression algorithms
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