SheerVideo

SheerVideo was a family of proprietary lossless video codecs developed by BitJazz Inc. to enable capture, editing, playback, and archival of professional-quality lossless video formats in real time on low-power inexpensive hardware such as laptop computers and video cameras. As tested on a standard set of Kodak images used in image compression research, SheerVideo's average compression ratio is over 2:1 for real-world footage. Because SheerVideo generally runs faster than a computer system's data throughput speed, this compression power means that SheerVideo runs more than twice as fast as uncompressed data while taking less than half the storage space. It no longer appears to be under development, and the last available version does not appear to be compatible with the current Mac OS.

History

SheerVideo was initially developed by Andreas Wittenstein at BitJazz Inc. in July 2002 by trimming all the fat from BitJazz's slower but more powerful codec, PhotoJazz.

Details

Currently, SheerVideo contains specific codecs for real-time lossless encoding and decoding of RGB[A] data (for digitized film and CGI) as well as Y'CbCr[A] data (for video); with or without an alpha (A) channel for compositing; at a precision of 10 or 8 bits per channel; fully sampled (4:4:4) or 2:1 chroma-subsampled (4:2:2); and progressive-scan (p) or interlaced (i):