What dictates the bit rate for Huffyuv for lossless AVI files?
 

I've seen plenty of discussion about bit rate when it comes to MPEG but what about Huffyuv for lossless AVI files?

I ask because, I have made two very similar captures of the same tape, both the same length but one has a video bit rate of over 2000kbps and other other only 1500kbps. Giving me a difference in file size by about 1GB.

Unless I am mistaken, these bit rates seem very low?

The only discernible difference I made was at the VHS player level, one was using PICTURE CONTROL on AUTO and the other EDIT.

Both seem very low to me for huffyuv lossless files. Standard DV is 25Mbit/s which comes out to 13GB per hour (with audio stream also in there) and being that lossless files typically take up 30GB per hour, the bitrate should really be more like at least 60Mbit/s for the video stream part. Usually most people don't focus on the bitrate of lossless files because it's not something that gets set by the user. MPEG2 on the other hand, the bitrate is user settable can usually range from 2Mbit/s to 15Mbit/s, though most standalone devices won't go above 8-9Mbit/s on the highest setting since after figuring in the audio stream, that puts you around a DVD recording time of 1 hour per disc.

Could be that the unit you are using is being misrepresented here, a better way to probably convey how much space files are taking up is to post the number of GB (gigabytes, not gigabits) per hour of your captures.

As far as differences per capture in a variable bitrate format, it could be that one source was less noisy. Recording just a blue screen, for example, should have a much lower final file size compared to actual video with rapidly changing scenes. For fixed bitrate formats like DV, a blue screen recording would still take the same 25Mbit/s no matter what.

I got this information for the actual file in Windows, Properties under Details.

The files in question are 40GB and 41GB for 1 hour and 36 minutes of capture.

In theory the one that was in EDIT should be larger as it should have more noise than AUTO but it was the smaller file of the two.

Those file sizes seem correct, doesn't seem your bitrates are actually correct because the file sizes are so close to each other, so it's not like one is 75% of the size of the other as the posted bitrate would suggest.

What does a program like MediaInfo report?

I'll have to give that a try.

Luckily, I took a screenshot of the finished capture in VirtualDub and it says "Data rate
7235KB/s".

Why would Windows show bit rate differently?

If the files are not identical, the file sizes are going to be different, It doesn't matter what file has more noise, Lossless compression does not work that way.

Closest reference I can give is here is the media info report for a file I captured that is around 1 hour and 33 minutes
Attachment 19800