Leo Laporte (6:48)

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T-Mobile Actor (7:49)

Thank you.

Scott Wilkinson (7:51)

Now getting to the question. Dolby announced Dolby Vision 2 at the IFA 2025 trade show in early September, and what it is is tools like Dolby Vision. It's tools for content creators as well as specifications for the metadata that goes to displays that should be able to interpret it. And you know, this was introduced at IFA and it was. It made kind of a big splash. There's a lot of content online, both written and video, that talks about it, which I'm going to discuss here in a minute. At the heart of Dolby Vision 2 is a redesigned and more powerful image engine which generates more metadata or maybe different metadata, probably the same as Dolby Vision, but with the addition of some more stuff. The key feature suite is called Content Intelligence and it's a suite of new tools which are AI based to some degree. And there are three elements in Content Intelligence. One is called Precision Black, which addresses the issue that HDR content has sometimes faced and has been criticized for, which is dark scenes that are just too dark. If you might remember the one of the episodes of Game of Thrones, I'm not sure if it was the finale or one of the late episodes. There were scenes that were so dark that people couldn't see what was going on, and that's frustrating. So this Precision Black addresses that by improving shadow detail. The second one is called Light Sense, which adjusts the image according to a light sensor on the tv measuring the ambient light. So if you're watching in a bright environment or if you're watching in a dark environment, it adjusts the picture accordingly. And there's some new reference lighting data that it uses as a comparative function. This makes me a little nervous. I don't like it when companies, content creators or TVs devices adjust things automatically. I'd rather adjust them manually. So I'm a little nervous about that. I also wonder how different it is from Dolby Vision iq, which is a variation of Dolby Vision that does this exact thing. It adjusts the image based on the amount of ambient light in the room, which is measured by a sensor on the tv. I don't really know. It must be more advanced. It must be an improvement of some sort. I hope. Anyway, Dolby Vision IQ only depends on the overall brightness or luminance of the ambient light. Maybe Dolby Vision 2 Light Sense takes the spectrum of the ambient light into effect. That would require a new sensor on the tv. So I don't know. I'm speculating here. That's all I can say. The third element of content intelligence is called sports and gaming optimization, which includes white point adjustments and motion control to address the unique needs of live sports and gaming. Live sports. I, I didn't know they used a different white point than other TV shows or movies. Maybe they do. I, I don't know. I'd have to look into that. Gaming might. It might want to be bluer. The white point might be set bluer than it is for TV and movies. And so being able to change that appropriately, you know, that's okay. Okay, so those are the three things in content intelligence. There's another feature that's very interesting. It's called authentic motion. What this does is it allows content creators to adjust the amount of de juddering, that is frame interpolation on a shot by shot basis. So if you have one shot that has a lot of judder in it, you can add frame interpolation to one degree or another to sort of soften that, make that less obvious. And then if you have a scene or a shot without a lot of judder, you can turn it off so it becomes a variable thing, unlike frame interpolation on a tv which is fixed. You turn it on, you turn it off, you set the amount of it, but it's the same throughout the entire program. This makes me a little nervous also because there are an awful lot of people who really hate frame interpolation which results in an artifact called the soap opera effect which makes movies look like they were shot on video, like, like a soap opera. On the other hand, if you have very high brightness HDR and high contrast in that HDR signal, it can have very high perceived judder. It can look really juddery as, as things either move through the frame or particularly in slow camera pans. So if content creators can do something to mitigate that, especially in high dynamic range content which Dolby Vision 2 is all about, then that could be a very good thing. Now this technique has been available for some years from a company called Pixelworks and they have a system called TrueCut Motion which is a tool for directors and cinematographers to do exactly that, to mitigate judder by manipulating the image in, in specific ways that are pretty secret. I think it was used in Avatar the Way of Water, which was a, the, I guess the second edition of the Avatar franchise. And also the Wild Robot was, were. These were two of the most recent movies that have used it, but there have been quite a few. So whether or not that this authentic motion will improve upon that, I would expect that because Dolby is so powerful in this industry that it's going to get used a lot. Whether or not it's a good thing, I don't know. We shall see. Now Dolby Vision 2 is going to be available in two tiers from TV manufacturers. There's going to be Dolby Vision 2 Max which, which is really intended for high end displays and it'll have all the features including authentic motion. And then There's Dolby Vision 2, sort of regular I guess for mainstream TVs that will have the new image engine and content intelligence but as far as I know it won't have authentic motion. So what about industry adoption? Who's going to implement this? Well, Hisense announced that they will. It's going to be, they're going to be the first company to do so in their TVs using the MediaTek Pentonic 800100 processing chip. It'll be in their 116 UX and 110 UX models which are RGB mini LED backlit LCD TVs. I know that's a mouthful, but that's what they are. And so that will probably be Dolby Vision 2 Max. Now what about studios? There's one content provider called Canal plus which is a French content provider and they'll be the first ones to use Dolby Vision 2 in their content. I assume that other more major content providers like Warner Brothers or Universal or Disney will, will incorporate this as well. I can't imagine that they won't. Now, it's important to understand that Dolby Vision 2 will not render your current TV obsolete. Very important to understand that regular Dolby Vision will continue to work just fine. Even if a TV with regular first generation Dolby Vision gets a Dolby Vision 2 signal, it just ignores the extra metadata and will continue to work just fine. So this is not immediate obsolescence. You don't have to go out and buy another TV when it's time to buy another tv when yours poops out or you decide you want to upgrade or whatever, whenever that is. Dolby Vision 2 might well be more common and you'll maybe want to buy one. Will it be that much more expensive? Who knows? But there's no need to worry about, oh my TV is going to be obsolete. It's not. It's going to work just fine. My current TV is Dolby Vision. It's a Sony A95L and I'm not worried about it. I'm going to be just fine. So Victor asked the question, what do I think? Well, I haven't seen it, so I can't really say from personal experience. I'm a bit nervous about authentic motion, but if it's used judiciously, it could be a good thing. Also, this Light Sense feature, I don't like manufacturers or others automatically adjusting things for me. I just, I would prefer to do that myself, so I'm a little nervous about that. But again, if content creators are careful about using, could be okay or maybe even an improvement. We shall see. I suspect that Precision Black will be a good thing. I believe that the complaints about some HDR images being too dark are real and, and justified. So if this can improve the situation, I'm all for it. Like I said, I haven't seen it yet. But a journalist by the name of Matt Bolton at TechRadar did see it at IFA 2025 in Berlin and he wrote about his experience and he was very impressed. I put a link to his article in the show Notes and you'll. You'll want to take a look at that because he was impressed. He saw a demo on two small Hisense A5 TVs. These are entry level TVs. QLED Quantum dot LED backlight conventional with full array local dimming. So not super entry level, but certainly on the lower end. And they were probably prototypes built for the IFA demo because One of them at least was able to receive and Decode Dolby Vision 2. The other one was undoubtedly set to Decode Dolby Vision 1 and they played appropriately encoded content on both the same content I assume, and Matt reports that the difference was striking. The DV2 Dolby Vision 2 image had more pop, the colors were more saturated, whites were cleaner and elevated, shadows and dark areas look deeper, but with improvements in shadow detail and improvements in perceived contrast overall, making the image seem sharper Even though the two TVs had the same resolution with more nuanced detail in both bright and dark images. And this was on, as I said, an entry level set. So it was Probably Dolby Vision 2, not the max version. So he didn't see authentic motion probably. He reports that Tom Graham, the head of Dolby Vision Content Enablement at Dolby Labs, explained that nothing has changed in the color or dynamic range spec of Dolby Vision for creators. It's still captured and crafted the same as before. Dolby Vision 2's improvements come from being able to provide more data to the TV about how the image is supposed to look as defined by the creators when they encode the content to Dolby Vision. It's about taking the data that's already there and making better use of it. So Matt Bolton was quite impressed and others who have content online either written or in YouTube form were also impressed. So I really look forward to seeing it and when I do, I'll certainly report about it right here on Home Theater Geeks. Now if you have a question for me, please send it along to HTG at TWIT TV and I'll answer as many as I can right here on the show. And as you know, all of Twitch shows are available on YouTube for free but with ads. If you want to go ad free, join the club. Go to Twit TV Club Twit and join today. Until next time, geek out.

T-Mobile Actor (23:06)

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T-Mobile Actor Jeff Bridges (23:08)

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T-Mobile Actor (23:11)

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T-Mobile Actor Jeff Bridges (23:18)

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T-Mobile Actor (23:30)

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Scott Wilkinson (23:37)

Nice.

T-Mobile Actor Jeff Bridges (23:38)

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T-Mobile Actor (23:39)

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Scott Wilkinson (23:41)

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T-Mobile Actor (23:46)

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T-Mobile Actor Jeff Bridges (23:48)

Dude, my work here is done with.

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