It's not a "mistake" using
huffyuv for analog capture or lossless working files. True, some apps don't like
huffyuv or imbed a version that won't read anything that the app itself didn't compress.
Many filters, such as many in Avisynth, work only in YV12. You wouldn't want to go YUY2->YV12->YUY2 to save that working file, it's an unecesssary color change because sooner or later your final output format is almost always YV12 for DVD, BluRay, AVCHD, and many web apps. Try saving your work with huffyuv as YV12.
Avisynth makes color conversions correctly, based on the color matrix, colorspace, interlaced or progressive, and other characteristics of the working file, along with your own instructions to tell Avisynth what's going on. Some NLE's (e.g., Adobe and sometimes
VirtualDub) don't always convert YUY2 and YV12 cleanly, and some apps never do get YV12->RGB back to YV12 for final encoding correctly from their own filters. Some encoders accept YV12 input only and won't make the conversion for you.
YUY2 is almost always used for tape capture because YUY2 is the closest easy-to-get the equivalent to the YPbPr color storage of VHS tape. You might not have to ever use a YV12 or RGB filter on that video. I use huffyuv for caps because my ancient capture PC's are a bit pokey with Lagarith -- which is not that slow (let us know if you can tell the difference), but apparently it's just minutely slow enough to cause a few dropped frames on my old gear.
Another problem brought up by a member here and by others: there are so many versions of huffyuv out there over the years, including some by ffdshow that seem to change every year or so, that often there are compatibility problems reading huff files between systems. In my own case, after downloading a ton of sample huff videos from forums over the years, I got tired of unplayable files and stopping to enable ffdshow's huff or modify my own huffyuv to match what some other users have set as threshold. Afterwards I have to disable ffdshow's version or reconfigure my own in order to read my own huff files.
Lagarith doesn't seem to have those problems across implentations. Both Lagarith and huffyuv for quite a while could not be read by some media players. Just about any player can handle both of them now, unless you get an ancient huff version or an obsolete ffdshow or other codec pack version, and you have to play around just to see a video. Of course if all you do is stay with YUY2, you have to depend on the way your filtering NLE converts to RGB for its filters and the way it converts RGB to YV12 for encoding. Knowing that some NLE's don't do RGB->YV12 correctly, I do it myself in Avisynth. I often use the HCenc MPEG encoder, which wants YV12 and won't convert for you. Another advantage with Lageith is the versatility to save files as RGB24, RGB32, RGBA, YUY2, and YV12 when needed.
In short: I use Lagarith for working files that need work and saving in YV12, and saving to YV12 for encoding. I use huffyuv for analog capture because it's faster in my capture machines and I don't want to hassle with capture colorspaces other than 4:2:2 YUY2 for analog tape.
