Yuv420p

yuv420p is a colour encoding used by many video codecs. It is notable because it has a good chance of being playable by web browsers.

Sometimes, I get a video file off my camera and it just won't play in the browser no matter how I re-encode it. The solution is usually that the pixel format is something the browser doesn't understand. There are many that might work, but it's very easy to just pass -pix_fmt yuv420p to FFMPEG on the command line.