Intro

There are many aspects which determine how the color information for a video is stored and how it is rendered. As technology has improved, new standards developed, and with new techologies such as HDR, new standards continue to develop. However, the result is that it can be confusing to know which color settings to use for a given video.

Some properties such as the color format must be set. However, properties such as color range, primaries, matrix coefficients, and transfer function are optional. It is always best practice to set these when you are encoding a video, because if they are not set, the player must make a guess as to what the correct settings are. If it guesses incorrectly, this can lead to the colors of the video being different from what was intended.