[FFmpeg-user] No pixel format specified - meaning of yuv420p?

[MRob]

Thank you for the very fast response, it's appreciated.

On 2016-12-01 16:23, Lou wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2016, at 03:00 PM, MRob wrote:
>> I'm exporting a video from an older Adobe Elements (Windows) with
>> intention to put it on the web (both H.264 and VP8). I exported using
>> Adobe's "DV AVI" which appears to be the most unmolested output format
> 
> DV is not a good choice: it's lossy and will mess up your width, 
> height,
> aspect ratio, etc. Install UT video. UT video is a free and open
> compressed lossless format that works well as an intermediate format:
> 
> http://umezawa.dyndns.info/archive/utvideo/?C=M;O=D
> 
> Then restart Elements and export using that. Make sure Elements doesn't
> change the width, height, frame rate, etc (I recall Adobe Media Encoder
> doing that often). Finally, re-enode the intermediate file with ffmpeg.

Oh, thank you for that information. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm 
working with Premier Elements, and after installing UT video, I don't 
see any facilities to export using it. Is this a limitation of Premier? 
Or am I looking in the wrong place? Thanks for the off-topic help with 
that.

> [...]
>> But from reading that mailing list post and the error message text, it
>> sounds like adding "-pix_fmt yuv420p" affects the output. I do not 
>> need
>> to retain compatibility with terribly old devices (though I am using
>> baseline level 3.0), so I wanted to ask if there is a better way to
>> handle conversion in this case.
> 
> You'll need yuv420p. Most non-FFmpeg based players and various devices
> don't support anything else.

I see, so the reason I hadn't seen that before was because any other 
videos I'd encoded likely had the yuv420p pixel format in the video 
stream already?