High Dynamic Range (HDR) video delivery on mobile devices often suffers from a major flaw: visual inconsistency across different panels. When browsing mixed-content feeds where Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) and HDR elements coexist, rendering pipelines struggle to balance them. This results in erratic, jarring transitions and unpredictable brightness spikes.
For content creators, this lack of uniformity compromises artistic intent. An HDR video meticulously graded on a professional monitor can render with clipped highlights, washed-out tones, or crushed shadows when viewed on a consumer device.
Eclipsa video is a modern HDR video standard designed to solve these exact cross-device ecosystem challenges. Built upon the SMPTE ST 2094-50 specification, Eclipsa video enables displays to dynamically adapt content mapping based on both physical hardware capabilities and real-time ambient lighting conditions. Backed by built-in, zero-configuration integration in Jetpack Media3 ExoPlayer and standard Camera2 capture pipelines, Eclipsa video offers mobile engineering teams a zero-cost, friction-free path to implementing next-generation, hardware-adaptive video streaming that preserves artistic intent on every screen.
Technical architecture of SMPTE ST 2094-50
Mobile displays vary drastically in their luminance headroom, the amount of brightness available above the display's reference white point. When a display's hardware limitations don't align with an HDR video's mastering requirements, highlights clip or look dull. A screen's actual headroom and reference white point change dynamically as ambient light sensors adjust the panel to the surrounding environment.
SMPTE ST 2094-50 solves this by introducing dual-layered metadata that ensures visual consistency through two primary pillars:
The reference white anchor
This establishes a strict baseline that maps the peak brightness of SDR elements directly to the display's reference white point. Any luminance value exceeding this anchor is reserved strictly for HDR highlights. This predictable anchoring mechanism ensures that when SDR and HDR layers are composited together on screen, they maintain their intended visual relationship without washing each other out.
Headroom-adaptive gain curves (AGTM)
Instead of forcing a static tone-mapping curve, creators embed parametric metadata that instructs the display pipeline exactly how to scale when limited headroom is available. The standard gives creators the granular flexibility to choose whether a targeted panel should soft-clip highlights, hard-clip them, or compress midtones and shadows to actively preserve the finest details in bright regions.
Platform support
Platform-level support for Eclipsa video playback and capture is introduced in Android 17 (API Level 37).
Implement playback
For standard app development, Media3 ExoPlayer provides out-of-the-box support for Eclipsa video. When parsing files embedded with SMPTE 2094-50 metadata, ExoPlayer extracts and applies the metadata seamlessly, requiring no custom player configurations.
Standard player initialization: To instantiate your player surface, see Overview of Media3 ExoPlayer.
Track overrides: If your app programmatically queries or locks specific HDR profiles, see Media3 track selection API.
We recommend offloading playback pipelines to Jetpack Media3. ExoPlayer natively handles low-level container extraction, which completely bypasses known platform-level decoding artifacts present on legacy rendering layers in Android 16 (API level 36) and lower.
Implement video capture
To record Eclipsa video from a device, your camera pipeline must be configured to generate AGTM metadata by assigning a compatible dynamic range profile.
After device support is validated using CameraCharacteristics, route the
stream to your encoder surface using the
DynamicRangeProfiles.HLG10_SMPTE_2094_50 profile. For instructions on how to
query and configure dynamic range profiles in camera sessions, see
HDR video capture.
No explicit codec configuration is required for AGTM metadata. The Android media framework automatically attaches and passes the metadata down if it exists in the active dynamic profile.
Compatibility and performance considerations
To monitor performance, retrieve the active Display object and check for
LutProperties on its overlayProperties to identify the availability of
hardware-accelerated paths.
For devices that don't have hardware-acceleration capabilities, support for opting out of Eclipsa video rendering in Exoplayer is in development.
Additional resources
- The SMPTE ST 2094-50 specification
- HDR Explorer: web app for inspecting SMPTE ST 2094-50 metadata and gain curves