Enhancing HDR on Instagram for iOS With Dolby Vision
Article Summary
Chris Ellsworth, Cosmin Stejerean, and Hassene Tmar from Meta reveal how Instagram became the first Meta app to support Dolby Vision. The catch? Their initial A/B test showed people watched LESS video with the enhancement.
Meta's engineering team tackled a complex challenge: preserving Dolby Vision and ambient viewing environment (amve) metadata throughout their entire video pipeline. Since FFmpeg historically lacked support for these iPhone-produced HDR metadata formats, Instagram was inadvertently stripping out critical display information, making videos look wrong at low brightness levels.
Key Takeaways
- First A/B test failed: Dolby Vision videos got less watch time due to 100 kbps overhead
- Compressed metadata format reduced overhead by 4x to just 25 kbps average
- Contributed Dolby Vision Profile 8 and 10 support directly to FFmpeg codebase
- Final test showed increased engagement from better viewing experience at lower brightness
- Manual extraction required: 2000+ lines of code for compressed metadata decompression
Instagram for iOS now delivers proper Dolby Vision metadata on all AV1 encodings from iPhone HDR uploads, resulting in measurably increased user engagement after solving a metadata compression challenge.
About This Article
iPhone HDR videos are encoded in HEVC using Dolby Vision Profile 8.4, but Meta's platforms use VP9 and AV1 codecs instead. The team needed to figure out how to preserve Dolby Vision metadata when converting between these incompatible formats.
Ellsworth's team worked with FFmpeg developers to add support for Dolby Vision Profile 10 in AV1. This made it possible to transcode from HEVC Profile 8.4 to AV1 Profile 10.4 using libaom and libsvtav1 encoders.
By June 2025, all AV1 videos from iPhone HDR uploads on Instagram for iOS carry Dolby Vision metadata. Users now spend more time watching these HDR videos in low-light settings.
