Huffyuv (or HuffYUV) is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format. Despite the "YUV" in the name, it does not compress the YUV color space, but YCbCr. "Lossless" means that the output from the decompressor is bit-for-bit indistinguishable with the original input to the compressor, given that no color space conversion takes place. Huffyuv's algorithm is similar to that of lossless JPEG-LS, in that it predicts each sample and then Huffman-encodes the error.

Implementations

The original implementation was written for Windows by Ben Rudiak-Gould and published under the terms of the GPL. The implementation is considered very fast, giving a compression throughput of up to 38 megabytes per second on a 416 MHz Celeron. The official Huffyuv has not had a new release since 2002. A more up-to-date fork of the code is available as Lagarith.

The FFMPEG project also contains an implementation of HuffYUV which allows HuffYUV files to be created & played on Linux and Mac OS X. Additionally, this means that many of the applications which use FFMPEG as a base can also play/create HuffYUV files, including VLC media player, MPlayer and ffdshow.