Are there any codecs that would work with YUV data without reducing the color resolution?
Like all 'perceptual' methods decimated color planes might be useful if you want to squeeze the stream as small as possible. But that might not always be the case. I've read a thread here at HA about why “reds look so blocky in video” and nobody there denied the problem; it just ended in arguing what is the true cause of the artifacts. Basically YV12/YUY2 presents additional task for the decoder/videocard: to do upsampling of the chroma planes. Most configurations just do nearest neighbour upsampling, producing poor quality.
The idea is to encode the video at full resolution and get rid of this additional post process. I plan to transcode Bluray movies in the future (when they will become more common) downsampled to 1280*x pixels – the most compatible resolution among both LCDs and good Trinitron CRTs – and encoded with another codec, faster than H.264/Cabac. Now I realize there actually are no encoders doing that. Most seem to work only in YV12. Even if better color spaces are in the standard, encoders have not implemented them. Have I missed anything?
Edit: I am talking about lossy codecs, like MPEG-4. At this point it looks like regular Xvid will be the best choice for lossy transcodes. But I would like to hear experts opinion on how come there are no full resolution formats available, given the popularity of HD-everything.