[FFmpeg-user] Does converting to yuv444p by default make sense?

[Werner Robitza]

As a frequent troubleshooter or non-working ffmpeg commands, it has
occurred to me countless times that users ended up with videos that were,
for no obvious reason, "not playable".

The reason for those broken videos was that the original color space of the
input video was RGB (e.g. when piping PNG images or uncompressed video).
Using x264 without any further options would result in the video being
encoded as YUV, but without chroma subsampling, i.e. yuv444p, which most
players cannot handle.

The fix for these problems is to add -pix_fmt yuv420p, but it's hard to
spot this as a new (or unexperienced) user.

Wouldn't it make sense, when converting from RGB, to automatically use
yuv420p?
Or are there any good reasons against doing so? I would assume that users
who know they need non-subsampled video also know how to force the
conversion.

Werner