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Roger Quero, Liwei Guo, Jeff Watts, Joseph McCormick, Agata Opalach, Anush Moorthy
We are excited to announce that we at the moment are streaming HDR10+ content material on our service for AV1-enabled gadgets, enhancing the viewing expertise for licensed HDR10+ gadgets, which beforehand solely acquired HDR10 content material. The dynamic metadata included in our HDR10+ content material improves the standard and accuracy of the image when seen on these gadgets.
Nearly a decade in the past, we made a daring transfer to be a pioneering adopter of High Dynamic Range (HDR) expertise. HDR permits photos to have extra particulars, vivid colours, and improved realism. We started producing our reveals and films in HDR, encoding them in HDR, and streaming them in HDR for our members. We have been assured that it could significantly improve our members’ viewing expertise, and unlock new inventive visions — and we have been proper! In the final 5 years, HDR streaming has elevated by greater than 300%, whereas the variety of HDR-configured gadgets watching Netflix has greater than doubled. Since launching HDR with season considered one of Marco Polo, Netflix now has over 11,000 hours of HDR titles for members to immerse themselves in.
We proceed to reinforce member pleasure whereas sustaining inventive imaginative and prescient by including help for HDR10+. This will additional increase Netflix’s rising HDR ecosystem, protect inventive intent on much more gadgets, and supply a extra immersive viewing expertise.
We enabled HDR10+ on Netflix utilizing the AV1 video codec that was standardized by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) in 2018. AV1 is among the most effective codecs out there right this moment. We beforehand enabled AV1 encoding for SDR content material, and noticed great worth for our members, together with increased and extra constant visible high quality, decrease play delay and elevated streaming on the highest decision. AV1-SDR is already the second most streamed codec at Netflix, behind H.264/AVC, which has been round for over 20 years! With the addition of HDR10+ streams to AV1, we count on the day is just not far when AV1 would be the most streamed codec at Netflix.
To improve our providing, we’ve got been including HDR10+ streams to each new releases and present well-liked HDR titles. AV1-HDR10+ now accounts for 50% of all eligible viewing hours. We will proceed increasing our HDR10+ choices with the purpose of offering an HDR10+ expertise for all HDR titles by the tip of this year¹.
Today, the business acknowledges three prevalent HDR codecs: Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HDR10+. For all three HDR Formats, metadata is embedded within the content material, serving as directions to information the playback system — whether or not it’s a TV, cellular system, or pc — on the best way to show the picture.
HDR10 is essentially the most broadly adopted HDR format, supported by all HDR gadgets. HDR10 makes use of static metadata that’s outlined as soon as for the whole content material detailing features corresponding to the utmost content material gentle stage (MaxCLL), most body common gentle stage (MaxFALL), in addition to traits of the mastering show used for shade grading. This metadata solely permits for a one-size-fits-all tone mapping of the content material for show gadgets. It can not account for dynamic distinction throughout scenes, which most content material comprises.
HDR10+ and Dolby Vision enhance on this with dynamic metadata that gives content material picture statistics on a per-frame foundation, enabling optimized tone mapping changes for every scene. This achieves better perceptual constancy to the unique, preserving inventive intent.
The determine under reveals display grabs of two AV1-encoded frames of the identical content material displayed utilizing HDR10 (high) and HDR10+ (backside).
Photographs of gadgets displaying the identical body with HDR10 metadata (high) and HDR10+ metadata (backside). Notice the preservation of the flashlight element within the HDR10+ seize, and the over-exposure of the area beneath the flashlight within the HDR10 one².
As seen within the flashlight on the desk, the spotlight particulars are clipped within the HDR10 content material, however are recovered in HDR10+. Further, the area beneath the flashlight is overexposed within the HDR10 content material, whereas HDR10+ renders that area with better constancy to the supply. The purpose HDR10+, with its dynamic metadata, shines on this instance is that the scenes previous and following the scene with this body have markedly totally different luminance statistics. The static HDR10 metadata is unable to account for the change within the content material. While this can be a easy instance, the dynamic metadata in HDR10+ demonstrates such worth throughout any set of scenes. This consistency permits our members to remain immersed within the content material, and higher preserves inventive intent.
At the time of launch, these necessities have to be happy to obtain HDR10+:
1.Member should have a Netflix Premium plan subscription
2. Title have to be out there in HDR10+ format
3. Member system should help AV1 & HDR10+. Here are some examples of suitable gadgets:
- SmartTVs, cell phones, and tablets that meet Netflix certification for HDR10+
- Source system (corresponding to set-top bins, streaming gadgets, MVPDs, and so on.) that meets Netflix certification for HDR10+, related to an HDR10+ compliant show through HDMI
4. For TV or streaming gadgets, be certain that the HDR toggle is enabled in our Netflix software settings: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100220
Additional steering: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
More HDR content material is watched day by day on Netflix. Expanding the Netflix HDR ecosystem to incorporate HDR10+ will increase the accessibility of HDR content material with dynamic metadata to extra members, improves the viewing expertise, and preserves the inventive intent of our content material creators. The dedication to innovation and high quality underscores our dedication to delivering an immersive and genuine viewing expertise for all our members.
Launching HDR10+ was a collaborative effort involving a number of groups at Netflix, and we’re grateful to everybody who contributed to creating this concept a actuality. We want to lengthen our due to the next groups for his or her essential roles on this launch:
- The numerous Client and Partner Engineering groups at Netflix that handle the Netflix expertise throughout totally different system platforms.
Special acknowledgments: Akshay Garg, Dasha Polyakova, Vivian Li, Ben Toofer, Allan Zhou, Artem Danylenko - The Encoding Technologies group that’s liable for producing optimized encodings to allow high-quality experiences for our members. Special acknowledgments: Adithya Prakash, Vinicius Carvalho
- The Content Operations & Innovation groups liable for producing and delivering HDR content material to Netflix, sustaining the intent of inventive imaginative and prescient from manufacturing to streaming. Special acknowledgements: Michael Keegan
- The Product Discover group that allows seamless UI discovery journey for our members. Special acknowledgments: Chad McKee Ramya Somaskandan
- The Playback Experience group that delivers the very best expertise to our members. Special acknowledgments: Nate Santti
Footnotes
- While we’ve got enabled HDR10+ for distribution i.e., for what our members eat on their gadgets, we proceed to simply accept solely Dolby Vision masters on the ingest facet, i.e., for all content material supply to Netflix as per our supply specification. In addition to HDR10+, we proceed to serve HDR10 and DolbyVision. Our encoding pipeline is designed with flexibility and extensibility the place all these HDR codecs may very well be derived from a single DolbyVision deliverable effectively at scale.
- We acknowledge that it’s laborious to convey visible enhancements in HDR video utilizing nonetheless images transformed to SDR. We encourage the reader to stream Netflix content material in HDR10+ and verify for your self!