Methods for driving electro-optic displays

A method for transferring and displaying a sequence of images on an electrophoretic display comprising a plurality of display pixels, the method comprising:

• remapping, by a host system, a plurality of consecutive images from the sequence of images an eight-bit-per-pixel format (Y8) to a reduced-bit format selected from a one-bit-per-pixel format (Y1) or a two-bit-per-pixel format (Y2);
• packetizing, by the host system, the remapped images into a series of bytes such that each bit within a byte corresponds to pixel data for the images in the sequence of images;
• transmitting, by the host system, the packetized remapped images to an update buffer of a display controller of the electrophoretic display;
• processing, by the display controller, each byte of the packetized remapped images to extract pixel data for each image in the sequence;
• expanding, by the display controller, each bit of the extracted pixel data from the one-bit-per-pixel format (Y1) or the two-bit-per-pixel format (Y2) to an eight-bit-per-pixel format (Y8) to reassemble each image of the sequence of images;
• and
• sequentially updating, by the display controller, the electrophoretic display with each reassembled image of the sequence of images.