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Old 21st August 2012, 22:05   #13  |  Link
Asmodian
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: San Jose, California
Posts: 4,403
A simple explanation which can get more complicated if you think about the equations for the conversion from YUV to RGB but this is the idea:
Full uses 0-255 for black - white.
Limited uses 16-235 for black - white.

Most video is actually limited, like blurays, but as almost all computer monitors are full the video is expanded to full range when playing on a PC. If your TV is expecting 16 to be full black but getting video data with black at 0 all the shadow details between 0 and 16 get clipped to black. The same is true of >235 whites but that is less obvious.

I like using full RGB 4:4:4 because that way the desktop, games, web video, and blurays, all look good on the TV. The only issue is that you have to make sure everything is converted to full range. If you notice dull whites and grey blacks you are probably sending 16-235 video but your TV is expecting 0-255.

As the almost all video is stored as YCbCr it seems like it would be best to send YCbCr to the TV but from what I have be able to tell with my limited testing the video is always converted to RGB then back to YCbCr if set. I use RGB as it avoids the extra conversion.
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