There are several ways to get an "uncompressed" AVI out of ffmpeg, but I suspect you actually mean "lossless." Both terms have a fair bit of wiggle room in their definitions, as you will see. I'm going to anchor this discussion with the 720p HD version of Big Buck Bunny, since it's a freely-available video we can all test with and get results we can compare. The raw data rate of 1280×720p video at