Share via

SDR YouTube Videos oversaturated with Windows in HDR mode

Anonymous
2024-05-01T20:27:40+00:00

SDR videos frequently (maybe always now, but wasn't always the case a while ago) appear wildly oversaturated to the point of being unwatchable in Edge and Chrome when playing in a window on an HDR monitor.

HDR videos look fantastic. Problem is limited to SDR videos.

Non video content on the same page is fine. It's only the videos that are affected. See following examples and screenshots.

While you won't be able to see the HDR extreme brightness (it's lost by the copying and pasting and you need an HDR display to achieve those high brightness levels), you can see how the colors are distorted and washed out. Here it is on the HDR monitor:

Here's the same window simply dragged over to a non-HDR monitor, where it looks correct, note that ONLY THE VIDEO image has changed, the rest of the window is identical:

When dragging across monitors, I can see its contrast and saturation flip for the video as soon as half of the video is on the other monitor, so this is clearly a software issue. That is, the video color doesn't just change because it's on a different monitor, it suddenly flips on BOTH monitors whenever moved so that more than half of it appears on the other monitor.

If I maximize the video to full screen on the HDR monitor, it's also fine.

Problem ONLY occurs when the video is in a window on the HDR monitor.

If I turn off HDR in Windows, problem goes away, but then, no HDR, so this is not a viable solution.

Windows Settings includes "Auto HDR" for enhancing SDR videos. That sounded like the culprit, but turning it off it had no effect:

Windows also includes a slider for "SDR content brightness," (see bottom of screenshot above and bottom right of screenshots below), but ironically, dragging that slider adjusts everything -- all SDR windows, desktop color background, etc., -- EXCEPT THE PROBLEM VIDEOS. Those seem to get their palette from something else and don't change with adjustments to the SDR content brightness slider. The one thing I want that slider to change is the one thing that remains unaffected. Oh what a twist.

Note here with the SDR content brightness slider at minimum (see slider to the lower right), the video is the same as above, washed out:

Here's the same scene with the slider turned all the way up. I'm not sure there the posts here show any difference that you can see (looks like the pasted images are the same), but I can tell you that for me while I was making the change, everything else got much brighter, but the video picture did not change as I moved the slider:

I have Nvidia GeForce drivers. I had been using the Studio Drivers. I tried the newer Game Ready drivers, but that had no effect.

I have run the HDR Display Calibration. That had no effect on this problem.

For a time, changing the edge://flags #force-color-profile to HDR10 fixed this (but that introduced other problems with menus), and sometimes still does for a little while, but then the problem comes back within a few minutes to days. It seems worse following the April Windows update, but that might just be coincidence.

This problem was rare and intermittent a month ago, but lately it seems to be nearly constant, possibly following the April Windows update.

In much searching the Internet for a solution, I see lots of people reporting the same problem, but found no good solutions. Some have reported turning off GPU hardware acceleration for the browser fixes it, but that's not a good long-term solution. Others talked about rolling back to older Nvidia drivers, but that was 6 months ago, so those driver versions are long-since obsoleted by now. This seems like it must be a bug, but don't know if it's a Chromium problem, an Nvidia driver problem, a Windows HDR problem, or something else.

Any ideas? Is there anything else I should try or information I can provide to help diagnose?

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Display and graphics

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments No comments

21 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
  1. Anonymous
    2024-05-08T17:12:52+00:00

    Hello GraniteStateColin

    Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

    Thank you for your feedback, I have read your description of the problem in detail and I understand the issue you are currently experiencing.

    You mentioned that YouTube videos are oversaturated with Windows in HDR mode. I would suggest that you could first try enabling hardware decoding in Edge as detailed below.

    1. Type edge://flags/ in the search bar at the top of Edge.
    2. In the interface that opens, type Hardware-accelerated video decode in the search field, and then set this feature to enabled.
    3. Test if your problem will just show up

    If, you have tried the above and the problem still persists, then the problem is most likely related to your NVIDIA graphics card and I would suggest that you can get in touch with NVIDIA's technical support staff, which will help you to get more information. You can click on the link below to submit your question.

    https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/support/

    We hope that your problem can be solved properly, thank you for your understanding.

    Best regards

    Brian - Microsoft Community Support Specialist

    Brian, that flag is enabled by default (see screenshots below, where those are original values, not ones I've manually changed). See other note in this thread from Pet0rUK that this was a reported bug, fixed in Chrome, but that MS has apparently not incorporated this update for some reason.

    It looks like you're with MS. I have reported this in the Feedback Hub and through Edge Feedback, but those generally don't seem to make any difference. How do we register this with MS for bugfix?

    Image

    And to be clear, here's the same URL in Chrome (on the left) and Edge (on the right). Clearly, Edge has some defect that is not in Chrome. Note that the pasted image is not identical to how these appear to me, but you can still there is a strong difference between the two browsers, even though they are supposedly running the same code (could this even by an intentional act by Google to ensure YouTube doesn't look right on Edge, at least not for anyone with HDR monitors?):

    9 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2024-06-25T00:23:55+00:00

    Adding the --disable_vp_auto_hdr flag to a shortcut for the latest version of Chrome fixed this same issue for me, on YouTube videos at least. Thanks for the tip.

    4 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-19T12:06:28+00:00

    Got the same issue with my dual monitor setup rn.
    My HDR Monitor almost always makes Youtube no-fullscreen and even pop-out videos look super saturated for no reason.

    I tried fixing it with some of the suggestions but it seems like nothing really works rn.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-08T18:08:53+00:00

    I'm pretty certain it's the same issue, but I am not sure why it isn't fixed in Edge yet.

    You can confirm if it's basically the same problem by launching Edge with the --disable_vp_auto_hdr flag. If that fixes it then I would expect that the issue is pretty much the same problem as reported in that issue.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments
  5. Anonymous
    2024-05-04T15:41:34+00:00

    It's a Chromium issue that has been fixed upstream but I guess hasn't made it into Edge yet - https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40073950

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments No comments