Video Encoding from Scratch

Ever wondered how a video encoder works? This is a simple video encoder that walks through building a video encoder from scratch to achieve a 90% compression ratio!

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/511342/203627486-611066cd-f8e5-48c1-863b-eab9529ff90d.mp4

Start by opening up main.go. You can run the code by running cat video.rgb24 | go run main.go and you should see this as output

$ cat video.rgb24 | go run main.go
2022/11/23 13:54:03 Raw size: 53996544 bytes
2022/11/23 13:54:03 YUV420P size: 26998272 bytes (50.00% original size)
2022/11/23 13:54:03 RLE size: 13592946 bytes (25.17% original size)
2022/11/23 13:54:15 DEFLATE size: 5457415 bytes (10.11% original size)

The actual encoding is done in about 120 lines of code. This is meant to be a didactic exercise rather than a comprehensive guide, but maybe if there's interest we could add more features that appear in modern video codecs.

Sample video from Ketut Subiyanto.

Other languages

• Rust: https://github.com/Carel155/codec-from-scratch-rust