iPhone HDR Video – HDR Playback on iOS Social Media Apps

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When I'm scrolling through reels on Instagram, every now and then (becoming more and more frequent) I will come across a video that slowly turns up the brightness a considerable amount (at night it becomes truly painful). The like and comment buttons (which are white normally) will slowly become desaturated gray colors. I'm assuming this is because the HDR video is overlayed with SDR content so it looks desaturated in comparison.

Here is an example video that this happens on: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChlmNv4D-i2/ (view on newer model iPhone in Instagram app)

This phenomenon happens to me and a lot of people I have asked, however it also doesn't happen to people with older models (iPhone XR does not seem to expereince). But, when I look up what iPhones support HDR playback, it says iPhone 8 and later. So I'm wondering a couple things:

  1. Is this phenomenon called "HDR Playback"

  2. What phone models support this annoying "feature"

  3. Is there a way to disable this? Other people on other forums have said turning on lower power mode disables it, but I was wondering if there was a more proper way?

I get that this can be useful for artists and pro videographers and the like, but when this HDR colorspace stuff is done on amateur videos it gets super annoying because they are frequently just overexposed and it hurts my eyes.

Best Answer

Yes, what you're seeing is indeed HDR video playback.

There is a combination of reasons why HDR content is appearing in more and more in third-party apps on iOS:

  • Availability of HDR content and standardized HDR video formats. There are now several HDR video formats available, and many smartphones and cameras these days support recording in at least one of them. Notably, on iOS, Dolby Vision (an HDR format) recording is even configured as the default.

  • Device playback support. All recent iPhone models and the iPad pro support HDR playback, so there is incentive for both content providers and platforms to actually support it.

  • HDR playback is the default: On modern iOS versions, developers don't need to do anything to support displaying HDR content in HDR – simply supplying an HDR file to the default AVPlayer API does the trick.

There is one thing that social media apps have to do to actively support HDR content: Since their client apps usually transcode video (either before uploading, or on their server/content delivery side to accomodate for varying codec/HDR) support on the playback side, they do have to make an active decision to allow HDR content.

As for why they do that, I don't know – I can only assume that A/B testing has shown that HDR content gets more clicks/likes/shares, similarly to how consumers often prefer the TV or smartphone with the most oversaturated display in a store.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a way to disable HDR support if the app in question doesn't natively provide that option (for example, Apple's Photos app does have such a setting).

In any case, you're not alone in being annoyed about the overuse/misuse of HDR of content that simply uses it as a way to increase the absolute brightness level (i.e. not just limited to particular highlights in the content presented). Hopefully, once the novelty of HDR has worn off a bit, Apple will provide a system-level override.

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