Android 17's new video standard could make blinding HDR videos a thing of the past

Among the several new features in Android 17 is a quality-of-life improvement that has the potential to be highly impactful in day-to-day use. It’s called “Eclipsa Video,” and it aims to make HDR videos look more consistent across different displays.

HDR videos often rely on your phone’s display to interpret brightness and tone mapping. This can make the same video appear overly bright on one device and dull or washed out on another.

Google introduced an “Enhanced HDR brightness” slider in Android 16 QPR1 Beta 1 that allows users to control how much HDR content brightens their screens. However, that is a manual control. With the Eclipsa Video standard in Android 17, Google is trying to solve that problem, and without manual intervention.

To do this, Eclipsa uses a standard benchmark for “normal brightness” that’s called the “HDR reference white.” This ensures readability of SDR content, text, and other UI elements while an HDR video is playing.

It also uses “headroom-adaptive” gain curves, which means the brightness of HDR videos scales to the display’s capabilities. This allows bright highlights to take advantage of a high-end TV’s capabilities while intelligently scaling them on less capable displays to avoid overly bright or uncomfortable playback.

Eclipsa Video also uses frame-by-frame instructions to ensure that each video frame is rendered correctly, with accurate color, mood, and contrast.

Eclipsa Video is natively built into Android 17, which means that devices running the latest operating system from Google will be able to take full advantage of the standard to render HDR videos more consistently.