Is AVI a lossy format? In other words, does it degrade quality of the video? Is so, how noticable is it? Would it look good enough to play back on my DVD player? And what other formats are non-lossy? Thanks!
AVI isn’t a video format. It is a file format for lots of video codecs. Some are a lot better than others. E.g., divx is a lot better than indeo. It’s like asking “is a Chevy a fast car?” Which Chevy?
If you go with divx or mpeg4, you should have nice enough VCDs for a small to medium size TV screen. (Assuming the DVD player can handle such formats.)
As stated above, AVI is a container format for several different codecs, each of varying quality and capabilities. DIVX is probably most commonly used and gives very good quality, though lossy, encodes. Others codecs in use right now are MS MPEG4, XviD, Indeo. They are also lossy as well as complex to use.
There are, however, lossless AVI capture codecs available. Huffyuv is not only an excellent lossless codec, it’s also open-source. MJPEG is another lossless codec but most distributions are proprietary and the format isn’t really designed for editing. Be warned that capturing a lossless AVI file can take up several GIGS of hard disk space so it’s not really recommended unless you have huge hard drives and plenty of processing power.
A better alternative may be to capture to SVCD resolution MPEG2 format. The quality is in somewhere in between VHS/VCD and DVD and you can get about an hour of video on a 700MB CD.
Just a note, MJPEG is indeed lossy, and it is indeed designed for editing. MJPEG is Motion JPEG, where each frame is a full frame compressed using JPEG. There is no motion prediction or compression between frames, which makes it perfect for capturing video at a relatively small size and retaining the freedom to edit it.
And in case you were wondering about how much space Hodge’s several gigs estimate really is, my experience is generally that HuffyUV video captured in 720x480 resolution runs 30-35 GB per hour. Yes, that much. Capturing in uncompressed RGB is about 40-45GB/hour, IIRC (been a while since I capped in anything but HuffyUV).