YCbCr

Many modern video codecs rely on a YCbCr colorspace. The correct written expression for this colorspace is YC_bC_r, with the 'b' and 'r' characters as subscripts. This is what the components represent:

• Y = luminance, or intensity
• C_b = "blue chrominance", or more precisely the color deviation from gray on a blue-yellow axis
• C_r = "red chrominance", or more precisely the color deviation from gray on a red-cyan axis

Green can be calculated based on these three values.

YC_bC_r is often falsely mixed up with YUV, which is a different colorspace that is not used in digital media but in analog PAL-based stuff as analog TV transmission or analog video tapes.

Note that with most digital RGB color encodings, every single pixel has a different R, G and B sample. The same is not true with many YC_bC_r and also not necessarily true for YC_oC_g color encodings. These YC_bC_r variants operate on the empirical evidence that the human eye is more sensitive to variations in the intensity of a pixel rather than variations in color. Thus, every pixel in an image of such a YC_bC_r variant has an associated Y sample, but groups of pixels share C_b and C_r samples.

For information on specific YC_bC_r formats, see the YCbCr formats category page.