Google's New Eclipsa Video HDR Standard Aims to Fix Your Phone's Blinding Screen Flashes

Google announced a new HDR video standard on June 29, 2026, called Eclipsa Video, built to solve a real problem: the same HDR clip can look great on one screen and terrible on another. According to the Android Developers Blog, the format grew out of an industry spec called SMPTE ST 2094-50, developed jointly by Google, Apple, and NBCUniversal.

Anyone who scrolls social media in a dark room knows the annoyance. A video suddenly blasts full brightness and forces you to squint or dim your phone. Switch that same clip to a living room TV and it can look flat and washed out instead.

Eclipsa Video tries to fix that with two pieces of metadata baked into the file itself. The first, called Reference White Anchor, sets a shared baseline for standard brightness so normal app interfaces and SDR colors stay readable without triggering glare. The second, Headroom-Adaptive Gain Curves, tells a display how to compress shadows and highlights based on that specific screen's brightness ceiling, according to both Google and Engadget's reporting.

The practical effect is that a bright highlight can stay brilliant on a premium television while getting scaled down intelligently on a phone screen, instead of just blasting the same raw signal at every device regardless of capability.

How It Stacks Up Against Dolby Vision

Eclipsa Video and Dolby Vision both use dynamic, frame-by-frame metadata to adjust the picture as a video plays, which is what separates them from basic HDR10's single static setting for an entire file, according to Engadget. HDR10+, a newer variant, added dynamic metadata too, closing that particular gap.

The real difference is money and control. Dolby Vision is a proprietary format, and companies that want to support it on a TV or in a streaming app pay Dolby an ongoing licensing fee, according to pocket-lint. Eclipsa Video, like HDR10+, is open-source and royalty-free.

That's not pocket change once you're building millions of units. Pocket-lint reported the per-unit Dolby fee might run just a few dollars, but multiplied across mass production runs it adds up to real money for hardware makers. Samsung, a founding member of the rival HDR10+ consortium, has refused to put Dolby Vision on any of its TVs, according to pocket-lint, even six-figure flagship models.

Eclipsa Video technically falls under the HDR10+ consortium's banner, but pocket-lint's reporting makes clear it's really an Apple-Google-NBCUniversal-SMPTE project running in parallel to that group's other work, including a competing effort called HDR10+ Advanced.

The Skeptical Take

Open and royalty-free doesn't guarantee adoption. Pocket-lint pointed to Eclipsa Audio, Google and Samsung's open spatial-audio format announced more than a year before this reporting, as a cautionary tale. It still hasn't gained meaningful traction against Dolby Atmos, according to pocket-lint, despite being free.

Dolby Vision has a head start measured in years, plus existing licensing relationships across nearly every major TV brand except Samsung. A free spec is only as useful as the number of screens, apps, and content creators actually using it, and that adoption curve is unproven for Eclipsa Video specifically.

The rollout mechanics look more promising for video than they did for audio. Google confirmed platform-wide Eclipsa Video support, for both playback and capture, is coming to Android 17, according to Engadget, meaning it won't depend purely on app-by-app adoption the way some formats do.

SamMobile reported that Samsung's upcoming One UI 9 software could bring Eclipsa Video support to Galaxy phones, potentially paired with Eclipsa Audio to challenge the Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision combination directly. That reporting is based on software indications rather than a confirmed Samsung announcement, so it remains unconfirmed until Samsung says otherwise.

Google has not announced a timeline for when specific TV manufacturers, streaming services, or content studios beyond NBCUniversal will adopt Eclipsa Video. Whether Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon build support into their apps, and whether TV makers beyond Samsung bite, will determine if this becomes a real alternative or another well-intentioned spec that never leaves the whiteboard.