[nightcracker]

You could still stream the pixels, you'd just have to stream them in Z order. This may seem pedantic, but this applies to any mismatch between the order in which you store pixels and the order in which the format stores pixels.

E.g. some file formats may be row-major, others column-major, some block-based (like JPEG) or a fancy interleaving scheme (like Adam7). Some might store the channels interleaved, others separate the channels. If any of these choices doesn't match the desired output format, it breaks streaming.

[akx]

And formats like BMP are stored upside down...