Samsung and Amazon Video have announced a development of the HDR10 specification to HDR10+ which will add dynamic metadata to the base HDR10 approach. The metadata can be supplied at a frame-by-frame or scene-by-scene basis and Samsung said that all of its 2017 UltraHD TVs will support the technology. In the second half of this year, Samsung’s 2016 UHD TVs will gain HDR10+ support through a firmware update. HDR10+ is said to be an open standard.
Amazon said it would add HDR10+ to its Prime Video globally ‘later this year’.
To support content creators, Samsung said that it has worked with Colorfront to improve HDR10+ workflows for creative post-production mastering by using Colorfront’s Transkoder. Samsung also partnered with MulticoreWare to complete the integration of HDR10+ support in the x265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which is available for free under an open source license, and is used by many popular commercial encoding system providers including Telestream, Haivision, and Rohde and Schwarz.
Analyst Comment
It’s one thing to say that you have created ‘a new open standard’ and another thing to actually establish a specification as a standard. The original HDR10 media profile is not really a standard, but is a widely accepted specification created by the Consumer Technology Association in the US. It’s noticeable that the CTA was not cited as a supporter of HDR10+.
The main advocate of dynamic metadata to date has been Dolby, which has its own technology and has worked for years on getting support into content creation workflows and tools. However, for brands such as Samsung, there is a reluctance to rely on an endorsement by Dolby (and, no doubt, a reluctance to pay a licence fee to Dolby). On the other hand, for less well established brands, Dolby’s ability to help them tweak their implementations to look as good as possible would be valuable. Samsung shouldn’t need that.
Samsung has been showing its dynamic metadata concept for a little time and Ken reported on it after visiting the company. (A Visit to Samsung’s QA Lab) As Ken reported, the Samsung approach to metadata has been included in ST.2094-40 from SMPTE. Chris wrote up the development of ST-2094 (Lars Borg Explains Dynamic Metadata)You can find an interesting technical handout here that also shows how the Dolby, Samsung, Philips and Technicolor approaches differ.
It remains to be seen whether Samsung can get wider support for the HDR10+ concept. (BR)
SMPTE has Samsung’s HDR10-based approach in its presentation
