Planar Formats

This section describes and illustrates the YVU9 and YVU12 Planar formats.

YVU9 Planar

Figure 2 shows how a 160 x 120 (19,200 byte) frame is sent to the display in YVU9 Planar format. Each pixel is one byte wide, and it is sent in left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. 160 x 120 of Y (luminance) data is sent first, followed by 40 x 30, or 1200 bytes, of V (the chrominance V component), followed by 40 x 30 bytes of U (the chrominance U component).

In YVU9 Planar format, one U and one V (1200 bytes each) is sampled for each 16 Y (19,200 bytes).

Figure 2. YVU9 Planar pixel format.

YVU12 Planar

This pixel format is similar to YVU9 Planar, except 80 x 60 bytes of V and U data are sent to the display after the Y data instead of 40 x 30 (see Figure 3). In YVU9 Planar format, one U and one V (1200 bytes each) are sampled for each Y (19,200 bytes).

In YVU12 Planar format, four U and four V (4800 bytes each) are sampled for each 19,200 bytes of Y-plane data. The YVU12 Planar format provides more data to the display than YVU9 Planar, yielding a higher-quality display with less noise and distortion.

Figure 3. YVU12 Planar pixel format.