Firefox will soon get a fix for washed out 8-bit HDR video playback

If you use Firefox on Windows to consume video content, you might have noticed that certain videos look a bit washed out and faded. More specifically, videos encoded in 8-bit HDR are the ones affected. But it looks like that might be about to change.

Mozilla has finally found the root cause of the issue and has already shipped a fix for the problem, albeit only for the Nightly build right now.

That said, this follows another video-related issue that we highlighted a few days ago. In that case, Firefox users on Macs complained that videos looked dull and washed out on platforms like YouTube. So it’s clear that Mozilla has to step up its game when it comes to video playback in the browser.

Details shared in the Mozilla Bugzilla thread about the issue suggest that the browser was assuming that 8-bit video files would never actually use HDR color profiles.

Because of that incorrect assumption, whenever Firefox ran into an 8-bit stream that was mastered in wide-gamut HDR, it treated it as a regular standard video instead of an HDR video.

Mozilla developer Ashley Hale fixed the rendering pipeline so these streams are handled correctly. The team noted in the release notes that the patch “fixes several cases of dull gray looking videos that should have been more vibrant”.

This change is already live for testing in the Nightly channel. The fix will make its way into the Stable channel with Firefox 157, which should be here in a few weeks. It’s the same release in which Mozilla will enable JPEG XL support by default.

While we wait for the wider release of this fix, you can try out the other new improvements that were added to the browser with Firefox 155.

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