Is there any reason an odd resolution for images/videos would not work as well as an even resolution?

Question

It seems fairly random, but I wanted to cover my bases, has anyone heard this before?

Answer 1

Not generally. There are reasons to prefer certain resolutions but that has nothing to do with the even or odd number of pixels. Do you have a reference for this?

Answer 2

Packing?

On modern processors, stuff can be retrieved most efficiently in even-number-of-bits groups.

Likewise many compression algorithms want to work on groups of pixels that are 2^n high and/or wide, and edge cases may be less efficient.

Probably not a big deal in either case.

Answer 3

Most analog video formats are interlaced : odd lines and even lines are drawn alternatively. So you have an odd number of lines.

But more than that, having image sizes factorizing as powers of 2 3 and 5 allow to have an easy scaling with integer factors. You can check the usual resolutions of cameras : they have a lot of 2s and 3s.

And generally compression algorithms like to work by splitting the image in blocks : JPEG uses 8x8 blocks. Processing video of arbitrary resolution requires some extra coding to handle the incomplete blocks on the image border, so one can say it does not work as well.