LiteWave is a fast and inefficient lossless compressor - it is developed for inclusion in AVI files as audio stream, and in this case it is indeed better if most of the processing power is left for the video codec (when doing real-time capture) to avoid dropped frames.

Also, it includes ancilliary data to avoid loss of synchrony. That is another reason for the suboptimal compression - in my limited tests, its performance was on par with Emagic Zap.

A lossy mode is also available. Sadly, the ACM codec - that would allow encoding into and decoding from AVI videos - required payment and only a demo command line encoder was available freely, so nowadays it is impossible to check how well it did, maybe paired with huffyuv, as a fully lossless audio+video solution.

You can visit a mirror of the LiteWave web site at the Internet Archive.

Compression performance in my limited test: 65,24%


Date: 2002-04-25
Version: 1.0.011
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: litewave.zip - 60kB