alt Hacker NewsThere's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.
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Just what we need, a new loudness war, but for our eyeballs.
This is one of the reasons I don't like HDR support "by default".
HDR is meant to be so much more intense, it should really be limited to things like immersive full-screen long-form-ish content. It's for movies, TV shows, etc.
It's not what I want for non-immersive videos you scroll through, ads, etc. I'd be happy if it were disabled by the OS whenever not in full screen mode. Unless you're building a video editor or something.
Sounds like they need something akin to audio volume normalization but for video. You can go bright, but only in moderation, otherwise your whole video gets dimmed down until the average is reasonable.
My phone has this cool feature where it doesn't support HDR.
That's true on the web, as well; HDR images on web pages have this problem.
It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR". But you could probably catch the most egregious cases, like "every single pixel in the video has brightness above 80%".
Can someone explain what the war is about?
Like HDR abuse makes it sound bad, because the video is bright? Wouldn't that just hurt the person posting it since I'd skip over a bright video?
Sorry if I'm phrasing this all wrong, don't really use TikTok
sounds like every fad that came before it where it was over used by all of the people copying with no understanding of what it is or why. remember all of the HDR still images that pushed everything to look post-apocalyptic? remember all of the people pushing washed out videos because they didn't know how to grade the images recorded in log and it became a "thing"?
eventually, it'll wear itself out just like every other over use of the new
I would love to know who the hell thought adding "brighter than white" range to HDR was a good idea. Or, even worse, who the hell at Apple thought implementing that should happen by way of locking UI to the standard range. Even if you have a properly mastered HDR video (or image), and you've got your brightness set to where it doesn't hurt to look at, it still makes all the UI surrounding that image look grey. If I'm only supposed to watch HDR in fullscreen, where there's no surrounding UI, then maybe you should tone-map to SDR until I fullscreen the damn video?
HDR videos on social media look terrible because the UI isn’t in HDR while the video isn’t. So you have this insanely bright video that more or less ignores your brightness settings, and then dim icons on top of it that almost look incomplete or fuzzy cause of their surroundings. It looks bizarre and terrible.
The whole HDR scene still feels like a mess.
I know how bad the support for HDR is on computers (particularly Windows and cheap monitors), so I avoid consuming HDR content on them.
But I just purchased a new iPhone 17 Pro, and I was very surprised at how these HDR videos on social media still look like shit on apps like Instagram.
And even worse, the HDR video I shoot with my iPhone looks like shit even when playing it back on the same phone! After a few trials I had to just turn it off in the Camera app.