Epiphan VGA2USB Pro - Manual (Page 45)

11. About Epiphan frame grabbing technology Glossary of Terms
User Guide Page 45
V4L custom video capture applications
Epiphan does not provide a video capture application for Linux.
However, you can use Video4Linux-compatible applications to
perform many video capture operations such as recording images
or video, copying, printing and saving images, or broadcasting
images across the Internet. You can also use the Epiphan Linux
SDK to create your own custom video capture application. The
SDK along with some example applications is available from the
downloads page of the Epiphan Web Site. To download the latest
version, browse to http://www.epiphan.com/products/ and
locate the downloads page for your product.
Glossary of Terms
This glossary describes many of the terms used in this Epiphan
Frame Grabber User Guide.
Color depth, bits per pixel (bpp)
Color depth or bits per pixel (bpp) (also known as color
resolution) is a computer graphics term describing the number of
bits used to represent the color of a pixel in a bitmapped image or
video frame. Epiphan Frame Grabbers support a number of color
depths:
• RGB 24 bits per pixel, RGB 8:8:8 format: also known as true
color and millions of colors, 24-bit color is the highest color
depth normally used. 24bpp can display over 16.7 million
colors. Most video codecs require a color depth of 24 bpp.
• RGB 16 bits per pixel, RGB 5:6:5 format: also known as high
color and thousands of colors. 16 bpp may look as good as 24
bpp in many applications while using less data. However
more complex images may not look as good with a 16 bpp
color depth. 16 bpp can display over 65,536 colors.
• RGB 8 bits per pixel, RGB 3:3:2, 3:2:3, 2:3:3: uses much less data
than 16 bpp but can only display 256 colors. 8 bpp is usually
only useful for video streams with very low color depth.