mkl0815:
The bad thing in doing this is, that you reduce the possible 16,7 mio colors to 256 colors, what is still good enough for the most effects.
Not necessarily. I did a mood lamp where the hue went from 0x000 to 0x5ff.
This range maps nicely to the hue 'wheel' (each segment of the wheel has exactly 256 values) and conversion to RGB is fast on an 8-bit CPU.