Nvidia's RTX Video HDR upscaling tool is coming soon to VLC media player, Nvidia announced at Computex 2024. RTX Video HDR uses AI to automatically convert your older movies or other SDR videos into HDR content directly. Now you'll be able to do that with all those totally legit videos you watch in VLC.
RTX Video HDR was first released in January, appearing only on web browsers — Chromium-based browsers and Mozilla Firefox. It's part of the Video Super Resolution (VSR) suite that upscales video from lower resolutions, adding in standard dynamic range to high dynamic range (HDR) conversion. While that's great for streaming services, it doesn't help anyone with a large video library, or with other use cases.
Now, RTX Video HDR will become a feature in VLC media player for downloaded video. RTX Video HDR will also become part of video editing software DaVinci Resolve and Wondershare Filmora, allowing users to upscale lower-quality video files to 4K and SDR source files to HDR in editing. It's a bit odd that the HDR aspect wasn't supported in VLC, since the upscaling feature was already present.
RTX Video HDR does its upscaling magic through machine learning using the Tensor cores found on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. The upscaler converts the original 8-bit video footage in sRGB color space into the 16-bit scRGB floating point gamut using a transformation matrix, resulting in 250x more available shades and orders of magnitude more theoretically possible colors. The human eye cannot easily distinguish between that many colors, nor does any modern display have ability to handle 16-bit color, but the scRGB gamut is perfect for rendering and mathematical color computation as the first step in an HDR-conversion workflow. The final output then gets converted to whatever your HDR display supports — typically 10-bit color.
When RTX Video HDR does someday come to VLC media player, your old-school anime and early-2000s cult classics will come to life with HDR and upscaling. Nvidia's full Computex press release on RTX Video HDR has some additional information and samples. For more on Nvidia's Computex announcements, check out our Day 1 Recap. There was a new "SFF-ready" GPU classification, new CPU details, and more, with AI featuring prominently in much of Nvidia's content.
