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

[Paul B Mahol]

On 7/27/13, Werner Robitza <werner.robitza at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

That is bad idea, you are forcing users that want to keep quality
to add -pix_fmt yuv444p

Instead this message was added in code and is displayed:

No pixel format specified, yuv444p for H.264 encoding chosen.
Use -pix_fmt yuv420p for compatibility with outdated media players.

Perhaps it should be in BIG _R_E_D_ blinking letters with popup window?

> 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
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