[theora-dev] Higher quality video - supporting greater than 8 bit color depth

[Holger Waechtler]

On Sunday 14 March 2004 20:20, Ralph Giles wrote:
>
> > As a user, I would like to see the following things in the next high
> > quality video format:
> >
> > 1. Ability to support greater than 8 bits per RGB or YPrPb channel color
> > depth, either arbitrarily defined (preferred) or as a selection of "good"
> > values or "green or luminance"/other color depth pairs, to have say 12
> > bit Y and 8 bit Pr, Pb. You be the judges what would be the good values
> > to support; I'd sure love to see e.g. 8, 12, 16, 24 bits per channel.
>
> Ideally, a compression format uses the minimum space required to represent
> the information it's given, so there's no penalty to submitting 12 bit
> source as 16 bit (as long as you don't dither, anyway). I'd suggest the
> interesting channel formats are 8 bit integer, 16 bit integer, and 32 bit
> float. I've not heard of anyone outside a scientific context using 24 bits
> per channel.

Since modern graphics cards provide half-precision 16bit floating point data 
types as texture and pixel format this might be interesting too. Then you 
could reproduce quite perfect specular highlight effects that are clamped by 
integer representations everywhere in your video processing pipeline.

The bad thing is that software emulation might get a little tricky for this 
data type.

Holger
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