


these conversions work with groups of 4 pixels so it's super easy to just play around with 32 bit blocks of data, or put 4 x 30 = 120 bits into 16 bytes ( 15 x 8 = 120 bits + 8 bits of padding for a nice round 16 bytes) With 10 bit per color/element it's possible for software to make lots of optimizations, for example they can pack a pixel into a 32 bit variable ( 3 x 10 bit + 2 bits padding) and it also makes it possible to do much faster conversions between YCbCr 4:4:4 to 4:2:2 or 4:2:0. The quality difference between 10bit and 12bit will be extremely small, but the software will be much slower in general.
