Does Black and white video compress better than color?

[sync]

I'm capturing some B&W tv shows and my initial encoding tests indicate that you can compress it more than color and still get good results. Has anyone else found that?

[skeetervh]

Yes. And if the original captures/tapes were color format, encoding in b+w should sort-of clean up that color noise that exists in a lot of black and white content that was in the color analogue realm at one time or another.

Nothing bugs me more than seeing some black and white video encoded in color, and having little sparkles of green or blue or red.

I suspect, however, that in the most ideally efficient implementation of a good codec, there would be no difference in file size between color or black and white encoding of black and white source material. The most obvious step that would make this possible is if some sort of 'grayscale' filter/conversion was run on the source.