| FFV1 | |
| Mime: | video/FFV1 |
| Developer: |
|
| Latest Release Version: | Version 3 (FFV1.3) |
| Genre: | Video coding format |
| Contained By: | AVI, MKV, MOV, NUT, etc. |
| Standard: | Version 4 (draft) |
| Open: | Yes |
| Url: | Specification development repository |
FFV1 (short for FF Video 1) is a lossless intra-frame video coding format. FFV1 is particularly popular for its performance regarding speed and size, compared to other lossless preservation codecs, such as M-JPEG2000.
The encoder and decoder have been part of the free, open-source library libavcodec in the project FFmpeg since June 2003.[1] FFV1 is also included in ffdshow and LAV Filters,[2] which makes the video codec available to Microsoft Windows applications that support system-wide codecs over Video for Windows (VfW) or DirectShow.
FFV1 has been standardized at the IETF under RFC 9043.[3] The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) lists FFV1 under the codec-family index "31" in their combined list of video codec references.
For long-term preservation of digital video sustainable container formats as well as audio/video codecs are necessary. There is no consensus as of 2013 among the archival community as to which file format or codecs should be used for preservation purposes for digital video.[4] The previously proclaimed encodings were Motion JPEG 2000 (lossless) and uncompressed video.
FFV1 proved to be a viable archival encoding and the U.S. Library of Congress began regarding it as a suitable option for preservation encoding in 2014. Compared to lossless JPEG 2000, FFV1 features comparable compression ratios and lower computing requirements. As of 2014, it is being used by archives, particularly where the collections do not feature extensive broadcast materials and instead consist of oral history and the like.[5]
Since around 2015, the European PREFORMA Project started working on the standardisation of FFV1 through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It was standardised in August 2021 as RFC 9043. The PERFORMA Project also implemented a conformance checker for FFV1 in the Matroska container. Details of FFV1's standardization plan have been prepared by MediaArea (authors of MediaInfo) as part of their conformance checking tool "Media CONCH".
It is also listed as a format option for long-term preservation of moving images on sites of the U.S. Library of Congress', State Records NSW[4] and others. The Society of American Archivists has published a paper in August 2014, suggesting only FFV1 as preservation codec for video.
The Digital Preservation project at the U.S. Library of Congress identified AVI and Matroska as common container formats for FFV1.[6] [7]
Within the video archiving domain, the interest in FFV1 is increasing, as can be seen in a thread on the AMIA-L mailing list, the PrestoCentre Forum or the Archivematica mailing list.Companies are also picking up FFV1 support. For example, NOA (formerly "NOA Audio Solutions"), announced support for the FFV1 in their product line in July 2013 and KEM-Studiotechnik released a film-scanner with FFV1 output in November 2013.
In an interview for The New York Times magazine about "Tips on Archiving Family History", Bertram Lyons from the U.S. Library of Congress says:
In January 2013, the possible use and adoption of FFV1 as an archiving codec was addressed in the issue of PrestoCentre's[8] AV Insider magazine:
PACKED - the "Centre of Expertise in Digital Heritage" in Belgium, say in an article about video formats for archiving:[9]
In 2015, the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) mentioned FFV1 explicitly in their call-for-presentations for their annual World Conference, asking "Is FFV1 the new JPEG2000"?. A workshop titled "FFV1 for Preservation" is also featured.
The "Österreichische Mediathek" has also developed DVA-Profession a Free Software solution for archive-suitable mass video digitization, mainly using FFV1 as video encoding throughout the whole workflow, without transcoding.[15] Additionally, they have initiated the development of "FFV1.3" (=version 3 of FFV1) together with Michael Niedermayer (FFmpeg), Peter Bubestinger-Steindl and Dave Rice; see
Here is a list of applications known to be able to read and/or write FFV1 video files, either natively or by installing codec packages.
Entries marked with "-" means that they generally only support either encoding or decoding.
The term "built-in" means that the application can handle FFV1 without the necessity to install additional codec packages.Applications that come with FFV1 support out of the box, usually use FFmpeg's or Libav's libraries in order to do so.
The list is far from being complete, and will be augmented over time:
| Application | Encoding | Decoding | Method | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DirectShow | ||||
| Archivematica | built-in | |||
| Their transcoder can handle FFV1 | ||||
| built-in | ||||
| Davinci Resolve[16] | built-in | |||
| built-in | ||||
| DVA-Profession[17] | built-in | |||
| built-in | ||||
| built-in | ||||
| built-in | ||||
| Video for Windows | ||||
| built-in | ||||
| KEM Scan (motion picture film scanner)[18] | - | built-in | ||
| built-in | ||||
| - | built-in | |||
| Media Lovin' Toolkit[19] | built-in | |||
| - | built-in | |||
| built-in | ||||
| NOA MediaButler[20] | built-in | |||
| QUADRIGA Video[21] | [22] | |||
| Shotcut[23] | built-in | |||
| built-in | ||||
| Video for Windows | ||||
| built-in | ||||
| DirectShow |
FFV1 is not strictly an intra-frame format; despite not using inter-frame prediction, it allows the context model to adapt over multiple frames. This can be useful for compression due to the very large size of the context table, but can be disabled to force the encoder to generate a strictly intra-frame bitstream. As the gained compression seems to decrease with later versions of FFV1 (version 2,3), the use of GOP size greater than "1" might disappear in the future.
During progressive scanning of a frame, the difference between a current pixel and its predicted value, judging by neighboring pixels, is sent to the entropy-coding process. The prediction is done as follows:
The third value,, is effectively equivalent to applying the "top" predictor to the current and the left sample, followed by applying the left predictor to the prediction residual of the top predictor. This method, also known as the gradient, exploits both horizontal and vertical redundancy. So in simple terms the prediction is the median of the top, left, and gradient prediction methods. For improved performance and simplicity, the edges of the frame are assumed to be zero to avoid special cases. The prediction in encoding and decoding is managed using a ring buffer.[24]
The residuals are coded using either Golomb-Rice coding[25] or range coding. Both options use a very large context model. The "small" context model uses contexts based on the neighboring values of,, and . The "large" context model uses contexts based on the same values as before, but also and, where is the pixel two above the current one vertically, and is the pixel two to the left of the current one. In range coding, each "context" actually has 32 sub-contexts used for various portions of coding each residual, resulting in a grand total of 242,016 contexts for the "large" model.
Early experimental versions of FFV1 used the CABAC Arithmetic coder from H.264, but due to the uncertain patent/royalty situation, as well as its slightly worse performance, CABAC was replaced by range coding.[26]
On April 16, 2006, a commit-message by Michael Niedermayer confirmed that the bitstream of FFV1 (version 1) is frozen:
"ffv1 and ffvhuff haven't changed since a long time and no one proposed any changes within 1 month after my warning so they are officially no longerexperimental and we will guarantee decodability of files encoded with the current ffv1/ffvhuff in the future"
The current authoritative documentation was started in April 2012, and stayed in a very basic state until 2015.In 2015, as part of the IETF standardization process, the documentation is now improved and reviewed by the CELLAR working group in close cooperation with Michael Niedermayer.