Mirillis forum

Hello, I have a few questions about Action! that I didn't find answered in the FAQ:

- Is the FICV codec lossless?
- If so what the recording quality options (high-medium-low) do?
- If not, is it possible to record in lossless quality (not even chroma subsampling) with Action!
- How does the FICV codec compare with the FPS1 (Fraps) codec?
- Is it possible to record to disk directly in H.264 using GPU accelerated encoding (via NVCUVID/Quick Sync)?

Thank you!

Zeckul wrote:Hello, I have a few questions about Action! that I didn't find answered in the FAQ:

- Is the FICV codec lossless?
- If so what the recording quality options (high-medium-low) do?
- If not, is it possible to record in lossless quality (not even chroma subsampling) with Action!
- How does the FICV codec compare with the FPS1 (Fraps) codec?
- Is it possible to record to disk directly in H.264 using GPU accelerated encoding (via NVCUVID/Quick Sync)?

Thank you!

- Almost
- Low, Medium and High
- Our files compared to Fraps take much less space with far better quality.
- Yes, Action! is the world's first software that allow it users to record directly into MP4 format in Real Time. With Intel Quick Sync technology Action! users can record up to Full HD (without IQS they are limited to 720p).

radi wrote:- Our files compared to Fraps take much less space with far better quality.
- Yes, Action! is the world's first software that allow it users to record directly into MP4 format in Real Time. With Intel Quick Sync technology Action! users can record up to Full HD (without IQS they are limited to 720p).

Oh, thanks I didn't know you had to select MP4 to get H264 encoding. So basically in Action!'s terminology, .AVI implies FICV and .MP4 implies H.264.

That said, Fraps in "lossless RGB" mode is lossless, so I don't see how you could claim FICV has "far better quality", especially since you say it is a lossy codec. It certainly has smaller files but I had hoped that was only due to the codec doing lossless temporal prediction, as I saw it's not keyframe only like FPS1. Does it at least retain 4:4:4 chroma information or perform chroma subsampling?

Zeckul wrote:Oh, thanks I didn't know you had to select MP4 to get H264 encoding. So basically in Action!'s terminology, .AVI implies FICV and .MP4 implies H.264.

Yes, choosing avi means recording with ficv and mp4 with H.264.

Zeckul wrote: That said, Fraps in "lossless RGB" mode is lossless, so I don't see how you could claim FICV has "far better quality", especially since you say it is a lossy codec. It certainly has smaller files but I had hoped that was only due to the codec doing lossless temporal prediction, as I saw it's not keyframe only like FPS1. Does it at least retain 4:4:4 chroma information or perform chroma subsampling?

FICV does not retain 4:4:4 chroma, and quality is not lossless like in FPS1. It is a bit lower quality than FPS1 and you can see the difference looking at chroma.