Video codecs (CO-mpressor DEC-ompressor) are widely varied and perform differently on different systems.
Codecs should not be confused with file containers (filetypes like AVI and MOV).
From my experience, the codecs that perform best in Resolume are codecs which have individual frames stored inside them, these are known as intra-frame codecs or i-frame codecs. MJPEG is a popular i-frame codec.
Unfortunately, these codecs either occupy a LOT of storage space (and play poorly from non-solid state hard drives) , or they have poorer quality than I-P-B style codecs.
Again, all of this is independent of the container type (AVI or MOV, etc.)
Resolume allows you to play video forwards and backwards, doing this with I-P-B is mathematically challenging, and therefore requires additional processing, so that's why MPEG-style codecs do not perform as well (or rather, require additional processing).
QuickTime is a proprietary technology produced by Apple. Unfortunately for us, they made this both a codec and a container (MOV), making all of this even more difficult to understand. They also jumbled this up with the native video processing libraries inside the Mac OS, so it's generally difficult to understand QuickTime altogether.
QuickTime is the native codec to Mac OS and video processing on Mac OS is dependent on QuickTime. QuickTime processing on Windows OS requires installation of the QuickTime libraries and some of the codecs are also installed at this time.
The AVI container is cross-platform, but is the native container for the VFW video processing technologies, first developed by Microsoft for Windows 3.1. AVI is NOT a codec.
So, just to summarize - I-Frame is best for Resolume, but requires faster disks (SSD is best), more storage (less efficient compression - large SSD is best
, and generally has poorer quality than I-P-B codecs like MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVCHD, AVC, ProRes, etc.
Resolume will require a faster processor to work efficiently with I-P-B codecs.
My personal preference is to pick codecs that have a lot of I-frames in them, but do not require tons of storage, and are contemporary.Generally, these are the professional MPEG codecs, one step above AVCHD/H.264. So 50-100Mbps codecs. These offer a good tradeoff for performance and storage. I personally dislike MJPEG, unless I am working with an older or slower comuting platform.
