HDR — High Dynamic Range — is the family of video standards that let a TV display a far wider range of brightness and colour than the old SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) world allowed. In practice, that means deeper, more truly black blacks; bright highlights that can hit 1,000–4,000 nits where SDR caps around 100; and a wider palette of saturated colours (typically in bt2020). The result: a sunset that looks like a real sunset, not a tan smear; specular reflections on water that actually feel sharp; deep night scenes with detail in the shadows.
For HDR to work end-to-end, every step of the pipeline has to play along: the camera or mastering tool produces an HDR master, the file is encoded at 10-bit using one of the HDR transfer functions (pq for cinema and streaming, hlg for live broadcast), the streaming server delivers it intact, the TV decodes it and applies tone-mapping to fit the brightness into what the specific display can physically reach. If any link breaks (e.g., a non-HDR TV, a transcoder that strips metadata, a player that doesn't recognise HDR10+ tags), the video plays in SDR or — worse — looks washed out.
Four standards matter commercially in 2026: hdr10 (open, baseline, supported everywhere), hdr10-plus (open, dynamic scene-by-scene metadata, Amazon and Samsung), dolby-vision (licensed, dynamic scene-by-scene metadata, up to 12-bit, the premium streaming default), and hlg (broadcast, no metadata needed, backward-compatible with SDR TVs). For a streaming product launch, the practical answer is usually "HDR10 baseline + Dolby Vision on top" — covers virtually every HDR TV at sensible production cost.
The book · Volume 1 of 7
Video Encoding: A Complete Guide to Video Compression — From Pixels and Color to H.264, HEVC, AV1, Quality Metrics, and AI
HDR brings brighter highlights, deeper blacks and wider colour, but four formats and many device quirks make delivery easy to get wrong. Volume 1 covers HDR in detail: HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision and HLG, PQ and HLG transfer functions, BT.2020, 10-bit encoding, and HEVC and AV1 for HDR. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Launching HDR without breaking playback on SDR devices?
Tell us your content and device mix: we choose the HDR formats, plan SDR fallback and give you an HDR encoding ladder with device coverage per output. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
