FFmpeg Video 1 (FFV1)

FFV1 is a great lossless, intra-frame, open-source video format, part of the FFmpeg project, and supported in a wide range of applications. It’s been standardized under RFC 9043.

It can store up to 16-bpc RGB or YUV channels with alpha, and it has both a very good compression ratio and is very fast.

All these characteristics makes it a great archiving, long-term storage and interchange format, and it is used in many public and private institutions. It’s actually the only open-source alternative to using Motion JPEG 2000, which is slower and generates bigger files.

FFV1 can be contained in .mkv (Matroska) or .mxf (Material eXchange Format) files. It can also be used in .avi (Audio Video Interleave) and .mov (Quicktime) files.

DuME makes it straightforward to use FFV1; just select one of the two presets:

And let DuME do its thing. There are a few settings if you’d like though.

Settings

Using FFV1 in DuME is very easy; just select a container and set the codec to FFmpeg Video Codec #1. You can optionnaly set the encoding speed, and limit the number of threads to be used if you’d prefer to spare some computer resources to continue your work while encoding in the background.

Set the Fine tune parameter to either Standard or Archival to tweak the output. Archival makes slightly smaller files but is a bit slower to decode, Standard is better suited as an intermediary format to continue your work on the media.

Don’t forget to set the transparency if you’d like to keep an alpha channel.

By default, DuME uses the same pixel format as the input if possible, and you should not need to change that; but you can also adjust it according to specific needs. The highest quality available (standard) format is either yuva444p16le (16-bit YUV 4:4:4:4) or gbrap16le (16-bit RGBA).