Dev Logs / 3 min read
Eclipsa Video: HDR That Actually Looks Right, On Any Screen
You know the feeling: scrolling your feed in a dark room, and suddenly an HDR clip autoplays so bright it makes you squint. Or the opposite — a video that looks punchy and vivid on your phone turns flat and washed out the moment you cast it to your living room TV.
That inconsistency isn't really about the video itself. It comes down to how differently every screen interprets HDR data. Google just introduced a fix for that: Eclipsa Video, a new standard built to make HDR playback consistent, comfortable, and predictable across devices.
Why HDR Has Been So Inconsistent
HDR was designed to make video look richer and more lifelike, but without a unified industry guideline, the exact same clip can render very differently depending on the display — sometimes blinding, sometimes dull and lacking detail.
Eclipsa Video is built on top of the open SMPTE ST 2094-50 specification, developed by Google in collaboration with Apple and NBCUniversal. Instead of leaving brightness interpretation up to each individual device, the format carries explicit rendering instructions that travel with the video itself.
Three Core Benefits
1. A consistent brightness baseline
Eclipsa Video defines a shared reference point for normal brightness, known as HDR reference white. This keeps standard text, app UI, and regular-range colors readable and vibrant without causing glare.
2. Adaptive headroom
Every screen has a different physical brightness ceiling. Eclipsa Video tells displays how to handle highlights dynamically — staying brilliant on a high-end TV, while scaling more conservatively on a phone screen to avoid sudden, jarring brightness spikes.
3. Preserved creative intent
Rather than applying one static setting across an entire video, Eclipsa Video carries adaptive, frame-by-frame metadata — essentially the creator's grading notes traveling along with the file, so the intended colors, contrast, and mood show up the same way on the viewer's screen.
Native Support Starting With Android 17
Beginning with Android 17, Eclipsa Video support is built directly into the platform. That means a more comfortable, true-to-life HDR experience natively on the phones, tablets, and TVs people already use — what's captured carries its creative intent, and what's watched is rendered the way it was meant to look.
What This Means for Developers
A few entry points if you want to start integrating it:
- Official implementation guide — covers configuring playback and capture for Eclipsa Video in your app.
- ExoPlayer & Jetpack Media3 — standard playback handling is already built into Media3, so ExoPlayer reads Eclipsa Video metadata automatically with no extra configuration.
- HDR Explorer — an open-source tool for inspecting SMPTE ST 2094-50 metadata and dynamic gain curves in real time.
Since it's an open standard, any app developer or hardware manufacturer is free to adopt it.
Compatibility Notes
Native Eclipsa Video playback and capture currently require Android 17 (API level 37) or higher, paired with an HDR display that passes Eclipsa compliance testing. The SMPTE ST 2094-50 spec itself is openly available for technical review.
Summarized and adapted from the official Android Developers Blog post (June 29, 2026) by Tibian Elsheikh and Jeffrey Jose, Product Managers, Android Core Graphics.