by Qyot27 » Sun Feb 15, 2009 8:52 am
No, H.264 itself doesn't support it. Distribution formats are generally YUV-only, if not strictly YV12. The only exception may be really harshly compressed MJPEG (but who would want to use MJPEG for distribution, anyway?).
Can you see the quality loss after it converts to YV12, and are you certain that loss isn't the product of your other compression settings? That's really the important question here. Colorspace conversions, while technically constituting a loss of quality via having to translate the channel info (and the fact that RGB can't be translated one-one to YUV or vice-versa, there's rounding errors), don't typically start showing the quality loss unless you've gone through several rounds of conversions back and forth.