I'm using Fedora Workstation 44 on a laptop with Intel Iris Xe graphics (Core i5-1135G7) connected to an AOC Q27G4XMN mini-LED HDR monitor. HDR is enabled in the monitor's hardware menu and in Fedora's display settings, but I haven't been able to get convincing HDR output.
In Firefox, I enabled several Wayland, compositor, and VA-API preferences, but 4K HDR YouTube videos still appear to play in SDR. The player statistics show VP9/Opus with BT.709 color, rather than an HDR color space.
I also tried VLC and Celluloid from Flathub. In Celluloid I configured `vo=gpu-next`, `gpu-api=vulkan`, and `hwdec=vaapi`, but HDR10 files look very dark and washed out instead of displaying correctly.
Is there a specific cable, desktop environment, browser setting, or media-player configuration required for HDR on Linux? Is HDR support still too incomplete for this setup, or is there a reliable way to get it working without switching back to Windows?
4 Answers
Linux and Fedora do support HDR, but application support is still inconsistent. Firefox and Chromium-based browsers are works in progress, and VLC handles some HDR formats better than others. For local HDR10 files, trying mpv directly is usually a better test than using a graphical frontend like Celluloid.
The connection can matter too. DisplayPort is often the safest choice, while HDMI may require a sufficiently recent version and the correct monitor input mode. Desktop-environment support also varies; KDE Plasma is generally one of the more mature choices for HDR.
Try the same YouTube videos in Chrome or Chromium to determine whether the limitation is specific to Firefox. Browser HDR support depends on the browser, compositor, desktop environment, and graphics stack, so enabling a few preferences does not guarantee that HDR output will work.
For Firefox, the preference generally associated with HDR color management is `gfx.color_management.hdr`, although the feature is not fully finished yet. Also check the video statistics carefully: BT.709 indicates an SDR stream, so the browser may not actually be receiving HDR from YouTube rather than merely displaying it incorrectly.
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