Earlier today, I posted a video of Mount Rainier at dawn. As I’ve been doing lately, I mastered the video in HDR at 8k resolution. My streaming-video-encoding process produces a bunch of lower-resolution copies of the video, so there’s no big downside to mastering in 8k, and in limited testing I’ve had okay luck with showing HDR video on SDR devices,Most players are able to down-convert video that doesn’t fit right. It may not be perfect, but sometimes it’s good enough.
so I hadn’t bothered producing both HDR and SDR masters.
This time, though, I discovered that my wife’s iPad Air (2025) did a terrible job showing the Mount Rainier video. The white snow on the mountain was squashed into a single solid-white blob and the whole thing looked terrible.
So, I went back to the drawing board and figured out how to bundle both HDR and SDR videos together so that SDR devices will be served the SDR version of the video and HDR devices will get the HDR version. It wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting, but there were a few tricky corner cases that had to be handled. Here’s how I accomplished this:

scottstuff.net

A walkthrough of how to bundle both HDR and SDR video streams together so that SDR devices automatically receive the SDR version while HDR devices get the HDR version. The process covers mastering both versions in DaVinci Resolve, transcoding them separately, and then using Shaka Packager with the `dash_label` parameter to keep HDR and SDR streams in separate DASH adaptation sets. On the player side, Shaka Player is configured to detect HDR capability via CSS `dynamic-range: high` and color bit-depth checks, with a fallback to SDR for devices like the iPad Air (2025) that report HDR support but cannot handle high nit levels properly.

Streaming Both HDR and SDR Video With Shaka Player and Packager