Black And White Movies

[cockpit]

are there any settings in x264 I should change for a black and white movie? anything similar to the greyscale encoding option in xvid?

[Revgen]

Nothing specific.

Other H.264 encoders allow you to encode in Y8 (black and white colors only) colorspace, which will increase the encoding speed, but the movie will look no different than a yv12 encode.

This is partially why the X264 coders are hesitant to include it.

[Oxygen]

Wouldn't be the encoding more efficient in size/quality with a grayscale colorspace ?

[foxyshadis]

Not really. After CABAC coding the chroma planes would take up virtually nothing, and even CAVLC would only be a fraction of a percent. Where it could help is speeding up encoding a bit - but maybe the ME will short-circuit fast enough that it doesn't matter, dunno.

[cockpit]

damn, I was hoping for a speedier encode. it's no fun encoding on a 3 year old celeron r 2.0ghz :(

[Sharktooth]

use faster settings:p

[cockpit]

never! :p

[akupenguin]

There is --no-chroma-me, but that's the only related option.