For some applications or content, being able to control the quality of some color components independently can be quite important in an attempt to improve overall quality, the compression ratio, as well as the overall user experience. Some areas, for example, may be characterized by different texture or noise characteristics even in the color components, while it may be important to enhance color edges, more or less so than enhancing the same information in luma. Furthermore, for 4:4:4 applications such as video display sharing and remote computing, it may be desirable to encode RGB content where the importance, and thus desired control, of the red and blue color components tends to be higher than the chroma components in the YUV domain. It may also be desirable to encode mixed video content that is a combination of synthetic content, such as computer graphics or applications, with natural images or videos. In this scenario, given the different characteristics of natural versus synthetic content, as well as the possibility that the natural content were originally 4:2:0 images up-converted for display to 4:4:4, having the ability to control chroma quantization parameters could potentially impact coding performance and subjective quality considerably

What is needed is a method that allows further control of the chroma quantization parameters compared to existing codecs, as well as extending this support for all common color formats (such as YUV, RGV, YCoCg, or YCoCg-R), all common color sampling schemes (such as 4:2:0, 4:2:2. 4:4:4, or 4:4:4:4), as well as a variety of bit depths for each component. Such method should allow signaling and changing of chroma QP offset information within a coding block in a much more flexible manner without placing any limitations on color or sampling formats.