How Meta Brings HDR video to Reels
Original post Bringing HDR video to Reels
Article Summary
Meta's engineering team just solved one of mobile video's trickiest problems: making HDR content look great on every device, from the newest iPhone to older Android phones. Here's how they did it.
Meta's Video Infrastructure teams tackled the challenge of bringing true HDR video support to Instagram and Facebook Reels. With millions of HDR videos uploaded daily, they needed to preserve vibrant colors and extended brightness across a fragmented device ecosystem while ensuring older phones still got a quality experience.
Key Takeaways
- Built dual rendering pipeline: HDR for capable devices, tone-mapped SDR for older phones
- Custom shaders handle both PQ and HLG transfer functions on fragmented Android ecosystem
- White UI text rendered in HDR brightness range to stay legible over bright video
- Server-side tone mapping doubles compute but runs on Meta Scalable Video Processor efficiently
- Client-side tone mapping prevents washed-out colors during upload and mixed-content scenarios
Meta now delivers true HDR video to supported devices while automatically generating optimized SDR versions for older phones, solving the device fragmentation problem that plagued early HDR rollouts.
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This page summarizes “Bringing HDR video to Reels” by Meta, published Jul 17, 2023. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
