[FFmpeg-user] Unable to produce a yuv444p video that vlc will play back correctly

[Peter Rabbitson]

I am replying in-line further down, but wanted to to ask a generic 
question, just to make sure I fully understand what is actually going on:

In 1997 Intel came up with the MMX instruction set which among other 
things allows in-hardware rgb->422/420 conversion. Since then all 
players default to this on a virtually hardcoded level, and the GUI 
subsystem is expected to convert everything back to rgb (using the very 
same instruction set).

As a result of the MMX success, everything in the digital video world 
*17 years* later is inescapably doing this rgb->yuv->rgb dance, even in 
the case of 100% correct and complete metadata. This is true for all 
cases including the situation when both the source and the destination 
are operating in the RGB24 colorspace: CGI produced under an RGB 
renderer, to be displayed in a web-browser player, which by definition 
operates on an RGB device.

Did I get the state of the art about right?


On 11/16/2014 02:57 PM, Andy Furniss wrote:
> Peter Rabbitson wrote:
>
>> This results (as expected) in a file identical to the source, proving
>>  that the video contains the full RGB (or equivalent yuv444) set of
>> color information:
>>
>>> ~$ diff miniansi_orig.png miniansi_frame.png; echo $? 0
>
> Players by default will use GPU for CSC/scale and these often won't
> avertise 444 as an input option so VLC will likely convert to 420.
>
> There is likely some way you could get VLC to do it, with mplayer  I
> think specifying opengl would do.
>
> I don't really know what to suggest - 422 would  be more likely to work
> - but then you would still see some loss.
>

You are actually correct - the conversion that took place is 422, not 
420 as I originally thought. Verified by:

> ~$ ffmpeg -hide_banner -i miniansi_frame.png -f matroska -pix_fmt yuv422p - | ffmpeg -hide_banner -i - -pix_fmt rgb24  minansi_yuv.png

and then comparing the way miniansi_yuv.png looks to the actual playback 
in a vlc window.