HuffYUV 2.2

HuffYUV is a free lossless video codec from 2000 that shrinks capture footage without changing a single pixel, and it was the standard pick for VirtualDub captures in its day.

It is frozen: Ben Rudiak-Gould's last official release was 2.1.1 in August 2000, and the 2.2.0 build here is a December 2003 update by Klaus Post.

For new work on 64-bit Windows, Ut Video Codec Suite or FFmpeg do the same job and are still maintained.

What HuffYUV Actually Does

HuffYUV predicts each pixel from its neighbours and stores only the small prediction error, packed with Huffman coding, much like lossless JPEG. Every frame is self-contained, so you can cut anywhere without re-encoding the frames around the cut.

The result is bit-for-bit identical to the input as long as the colour format stays the same, for example YUY2 in and YUY2 out. Its documentation quotes real-time compression of 720 x 480 video at 30 frames per second on a 416 MHz Celeron.

Two options are not lossless: converting RGB input to YUY2, and the "Reduced resolution" mode added in 2.2.0, which saves at half size and scales back up on playback.

2.2.0 or 2.1.1: Which File to Pick

The download page carries both. Version 2.1.1 is Ben Rudiak-Gould's original and is the one marked Recommended, and long-time users still prefer it.

Version 2.2.0, published as "HuffYUV revisited", builds on the CCESP patch for Cinema Craft Encoder users. It stores the interlaced flag in the AVI file, adds faster MMX colour conversion and the reduced resolution option. Both builds are 32-bit only.

Who Can Still Use It

• Anyone digitising VHS or other analog tapes on an older PC with classic VirtualDub, which is a 32-bit program.
• Anyone with an archive of HuffYUV AVI files that a 32-bit editor needs to open.

For capture, your card must deliver YUY2, UYVY or RGB. Cards that only output Motion JPEG cannot capture to HuffYUV, though you can still use it for editing.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Anyone using 64-bit editing or capture software. A 32-bit codec never appears in a 64-bit program's codec list, which is the quickest tell that HuffYUV is the wrong tool.

The same goes for HD and 4K work, where multithreaded codecs are much faster, and for Windows 10 or 11, where the 2000-era right-click installer often fails to set it up properly.

What to Use Instead

• Ut Video Codec Suite is the closest modern swap: free, open source, multithreaded and available in 32-bit and 64-bit.
• MagicYUV is built for speed at Full HD and 4K, but it is shareware rather than free.
• VirtualDub2 is the maintained successor to VirtualDub, with HuffYUV, FFV1 and Lagarith output built in, so no separate codec install is needed.
• Lagarith compresses better than HuffYUV, but it is also frozen, with no update since 2011.

FFmpeg reads and writes HuffYUV, its own FFvHuff variant, FFV1 and Ut Video from the command line. A command such as ffmpeg -i capture.avi -c:v utvideo -c:a copy archive.avi moves an old capture to Ut Video with nothing lost.

To simply watch HuffYUV files, VLC Media Player and LAV Filters decode them with FFmpeg's built-in decoder, no codec install needed.

More lossless and legacy codecs are listed in the Video Codecs section.

Quick questions

Download HuffYUV 2.2 if you still need it, or tell us what you used it for if you have history with it.