New Delhi: Meta has supercharged its Instagram for iOS application by enhancing HDR videos by enabling Dolby Vision. Alongside, the company has also released an ambient viewing environment in the Instagram iOS application. Instagram for iOS application. Instagram for iOS is now the first Meta application to support Dolby Vision video, with more support coming across all of Meta’s applications in the future. Meta has also explained in a blog post that, “every iPhone produced HDR video encoding includes two additional pieces of metadata that help ensure the picture is consistent between different displays and viewing conditions.”
Dolby Vision: which enhances colour, brightness, and contrast better to match the video to the capabilities of the display.
Ambient Viewing Environment: which provides the characteristics of the nominal ambient viewing environment for displaying associated video content. This information enables the final device to adjust the rendering of the video if the actual ambient viewing conditions differ from those for which it was encoded.
While the Instagram and Facebook iOS applications have had support for HDR videos since 2022, this version has lacked support for Dolby Vision or AV1 delivery and playback. Their derived encodings were done with FFmpeg, which had traditionally lacked support for Dolby Vision and amve. Since their tooling was discarding this metadata, it meant that pictures were not entirely representative of the way they were meant to be viewed, something that was particularly noticeable at low screen brightness levels. The company worked with its partners to preserve the iOS-produced amve and Dolby Vision metadata from end-to-end and significantly enhanced the HDR viewing experience on iOS devices.
