On: H.264 is Magic (2016)

[phire]

YUV alone is still 3 bytes per pixel and can be converted back to rgb without any loss.

But YUV is almost always combined with color subsampling, which gets you to 1.5 or 2 bytes per pixel.

[fomine3 → phire]

Yes, OP might want to say YUV422 or YUV420 that most videos are encoded.