HDR10 HDR10 Media Profile

What HDR10 is

HDR10 — formally the HDR10 Media Profile — is an open high-dynamic-range video standard announced on 27 August 2015 by the Consumer Electronics Association, now the Consumer Technology Association. It is built on the ITU BT.2100 family of HDR standards.

The "10" refers to bit depth: 10 bits of grayscale quantizing per RGB channel, versus 8-bit for SDR, with up to roughly 1.07 billion representable colors. That extra precision is necessary to avoid banding under the Perceptual Quantizer (PQ) transfer function defined in SMPTE ST 2084, which was developed by Dolby Laboratories and standardized by SMPTE in 2014. PQ replaces the gamma curve used in SDR and is the shared luminance basis for HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision.

The container color primaries are ITU-R BT.2020, the same wide color gamut defined for Ultra HD by the ITU.

Static metadata

HDR10's required static metadata is defined by SMPTE ST 2086 — the minimum and maximum mastering display luminance and the chromaticities of the mastering-display primaries — supplemented by Maximum Content Light Level (MaxCLL) and Maximum Frame Average Light Level (MaxFALL) defined in CTA-861 and the Blu-ray specifications.

The metadata is called "static" because a single set of values is delivered with the content and applies to the entire program — values do not vary scene-to-scene or frame-to-frame. As a consequence, a display cannot adapt its tone mapping to the peak brightness of any specific scene.

Across an HDMI link, the ST 2086 mastering-display metadata, MaxCLL, and MaxFALL are transmitted in the HDR Static Metadata InfoFrame defined in CTA-861.3 (formerly CEA-861.3). The standard adds an InfoFrame and an EDID CTA data block that signal the SMPTE ST 2084 EOTF and the ST 2086 metadata to the display.

PQ encodes luminance from 0 to 10,000 cd/m² (nits), which is HDR10's theoretical ceiling, but in practice common HDR10 content is mastered between 1,000 and 4,000 nits because no consumer display reaches 10,000 nits.

Ecosystem

On 14 February 2016 the Blu-ray Disc Association released the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification with mandatory support for HDR10 Media Profile video. Dolby Vision was optional at launch, and HDR10+ was added as an optional format in BDA spec v3.2 on 23 January 2018.

Outside disc, HDR10 is the lone HDR format common to every major delivery platform: Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Microsoft Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, Apple TV, all major streaming services, and UHD Blu-ray. Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are each supported by various subsets of those platforms but never by all simultaneously, which is why HDR10 functions as the universal baseline.

The structural reason that mandate is possible is licensing: HDR10 is open and royalty-free, with no licensing fees and no required patent payments. Manufacturers can ship HDR10 without per-unit royalties, unlike Dolby Vision, which requires licensing.

vs dynamic-metadata HDR

Because HDR10 carries one set of metadata for the whole title, a display applies a single tone-mapping curve across all scenes. Bright outdoor scenes, dark night scenes, and explosions all receive the same global compensation, so darker scenes can be dimmed and desaturated unnecessarily. HDR10+ and Dolby Vision address this by carrying per-scene or per-frame dynamic metadata.

Tone mapping itself is invoked whenever the source's peak luminance exceeds the display's peak luminance. The TV uses the ST 2086 mastering-display metadata together with MaxCLL and MaxFALL to roll off the highest PQ code values into its actual brightness ceiling, attempting to preserve highlight detail while approximating creative intent.

Versus Dolby Vision, HDR10 differs on two structural axes: HDR10 carries a 10-bit signal with static metadata, while Dolby Vision uses a 12-bit container with dynamic metadata. HDR10+ matches Dolby Vision's dynamic-metadata approach but stays at 10-bit and remains royalty-free.