[MEncoder-users] 12bpp, what does it mean?

[Loren Merritt]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006, Pepe wrote:

> I realized that all the videos I created with mencoder say something like this
> when playing with mplayer:
>
> VIDEO:  [XVID]  576x432  12bpp  25.000 fps  824.2 kbps (100.6 kbyte/s)
>
> But videos I downloaded from internet say 24bpp instead of 12bpp. What does
> 12bpp mean?
>
> Is it because my screen is configured to 16 bit color? But what does it have
> to do for creating a video?

It means absolutely nothing. There is a field in the avi header named 
"bpp", which specifies the bits per pixel of uncompressed content. But 
XviD is compressed, so that field is ignored.

--Loren Merritt