Rec. 601

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Rec. 601

Rec. 601 chromaticity diagram, with 625-line (PAL and SECAM) and 525-line (NTSC SMPTE C primaries) areas shown in black and white
Status	Approved
First published	1982; 42 years ago (1982)
Latest version	BT.601-7 March 8, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-03-08)
Authors	ITU-R (CCIR)
Base standards	Rec.601, BT.601, CCIR 601
Related standards	ISO/IEC MPEG, ITU-T H.26x
Domain	Digital image processing
Website	www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BT.601/

ITU-R Recommendation BT.601, more commonly known by the abbreviations Rec. 601 or BT.601 (or its former name CCIR 601), is a standard originally issued in 1982 by the CCIR (an organization, which has since been renamed as the International Telecommunication Union – Radiocommunication sector) for encoding interlaced analog video signals in digital video form.^[1] It includes methods of encoding 525-line 60 Hz and 625-line 50 Hz signals, both with an active region covering 720 luminance samples and 360 chrominance samples per line. The color encoding system is known as YCbCr 4:2:2.

The Rec. 601 video raster format has been re-used in a number of later standards, including the ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T H.26x compressed formats, although compressed formats for consumer applications usually use chroma subsampling reduced from the 4:2:2 sampling specified in Rec. 601 to 4:2:0.

The standard has been revised several times in its history. Its seventh edition, referred to as BT.601-7, was approved in March 2011 and was formally published in October 2011.