Is anyone aware of a way of forcing Recode to add a dropdown option in Recode? Or is there some setting I am using that prevents me using any other color mode? Or is Recode just poorly coded and doesn't offer all the options I could have? Problem is the only option Recode offers me against the 'Color Mode' option is one simple 'YUV 4:2:0 Planar 12bpp' and there does not seem to be any other option or setting anywhere else in the program to change that. So, I run 'ffmpeg -pix_fmts' I get a looooooooong list of options including 'yuvj420p'. I know I should instead be using 'pix_fmt yuvj420p' says someone random.

This only provides 8 bits of colour, according to the output. I've done some digging around and found that the reason is the color mode being used: yuv420p. (Notably the 'Shangri-La' in FC4 where the reds are turned into very grey 'reds'.) Most of the time this doesn't bother me, but sometimes it is so ridiculously obvious it positively hurts my eyes with vibrant colours reduced to absolute grey garbage. I am converting fraps AVI videos to MP4s and I've been using a program called Xmedia Recode - which is just a shell around FFMPEG for the grunt work - but I am finding my output videos are 'washed out'.

Xmedia recode lossless 10bit to 8bit