H.264 Lossless Output Won't Render And Play In Windows?

So I’m using Blender 2.79. I’ve rendered PNG images and I’m trying to use the video editor to output a file that is LOSSLESS in both audio and video from an already rendered series of images. I think I might have ran into a bug.

I am able to create a video that plays on Windows Media Player, but when I try to use “lossless” for quality in H.264 it Will Play in VLC Media Play but it won’t play in anything else. This is a problem, because I want to use this in other video editing products which it is not being recognized in either. See the pic for settings. What should I do to accomplish my goals here? I’ve tried other formats and I can’t get them to play on anything but VLC!


Hmmm, I didn’t think that h264 really supported lossless. Try another codec?

Also I’e had problems with h264 being recognised elsewhere if the audio muxing isn’t as expected.

Lossless h264 should mean that none of the coefficients that make up a DCT macroblock are thrown away and precision or values are kept in some other areas where insignificant differences are discarded for lossy compression. I suspect that lossless h264 is intra-frame only, because motion estimation is by nature lossy, it is practically impossible to find identical block somewhere else for any real world footage with noise/grain.

I’m a bit confused kesonmis? Are there any other Lossless outputs guys that are highly compatible that you use with audio codecs etc.?

Personally I never use video for lossless stuff. Lossless is useful as intermediate format for production, but overkill for display. As intermediate I use exr or png sequences, wav for audio. Display format depends on the use case, either h264, some prores variant, DNx etc with compatible audio (usually lossy).

I prefer lossless for what I’m using since it is going to be rendered in other videos as an intro etc. I think this is actually a bug. Basically a series of images will render in an AVI container H.264 Codec as “perceptually lossless” just fine, and the video will play in Movies & TV the stock app on Windows. When you render “lossless” it won’t play the video only the audio, however it WILL play in VLC. Outside of VLC Lossless h.264 with an AVI container WON’T work on anything else including other video editors I use all say it’s corrupt. Again, this doesn’t happen, and other programs don’t say it is corrupt with perceptually lossless H.264 AVI container but they do with lossless.

Somewhere along the line Blender is changing a codec or something between those two since they should play the same correct me if I’m wrong?

The problem with codecs is that it is easier to support encoding than decoding. Because for encoding you choose yourself, what and how you are doing. Decoding on the other hand has to work with someone else’s imaginations. h264 is a pretty complicated codec, so it is not uncommon that some combination of settings and features used will not be readable in some other software. This is where standards are helpful, but lossless h264 is not standardised afaik.

I see. Can you help me find one that is lossless? MPEG4 (DIVX) Lossless. That indeed does work in AVI, but I don’t believe it is lossless since the quality isn’t even as good as H.264 in Perceptually Lossless which I admit works everywhere, will probably suffice, and is very close to lossless but still not technically lossless. I actually noticed with MPEG 4 DIVX that when I didn’t use lossless but instead used manual settings turning up the bitrates very high it was actually better quality than the lossless option for DIVX MPEG4. I’m wondering if that might be a bug too?

Lossless should be I frame encoded virtual pass through of each rendered frame.

I don’t know what this means sorry?

H264 support lossless!
The file is huge (5 minutes of videos = 5 Gigas)
Though I use medium speed for encoding and I use MP3 320 for the sound.