Jetson Orin V4L2 Encoder Silently Drops BT.2020 and Full-Range Colorimetry

Engineers building HDR or wide-gamut streaming pipelines on Jetson AGX Orin cannot rely on the V4L2 encoder to signal BT.2020 or full-range metadata correctly, forcing workarounds at the muxer or bitstream level — and only if the pixel data itself remains unmodified. NVIDIA has acknowledged the gap but has not committed to a timeline for a fix. The broader Jetson embedded encoding ecosystem has seen recurring colorimetry issues since at least August 2024, when a separate developer reported partial BT.709 signaling failures on the same platform. Watch for NVIDIA L4T release notes mentioning tegrav4l2 colorimetry fixes in upcoming JetPack updates.

The BT.2020 colorimetry gap is not an isolated issue on the Jetson platform. In August 2024, a developer on NVIDIA's Jetson forums reported that H.264 encoding on a Jetson AGX Orin running L4T R36.3 failed to correctly signal BT.709 colorspace metadata — the encoder set colour_primaries and transfer_characteristics to 0 (a reserved value) instead of the correct values, causing decoders to misidentify the stream as BT.601 limited range. NVIDIA responded by providing a patched library for L4T R35.5.0, but the thread suggests the fix was not propagated to later releases at the time.

NVIDIA's own V4L2 encoder documentation references a control ID, V4L2_CID_MPEG_VIDEOENC_EXTEDED_COLORFORMAT (V4L2_CID_MPEG_BASE+548), designed to enable or disable setting extended color format values in VUI info. The documentation notes this control must be set after V4L2_CID_MPEG_VIDEOENC_INSERT_VUI is enabled and after formats are set on both planes. However, the forum report indicates that even when developers attempt to use the standard V4L2 colorspace API and detailed sub-fields (ycbcr_enc, quantization, xfer_func), the tegrav4l2 driver returns EINVAL and discards the values — suggesting the control exists in the API surface but is not fully implemented for all color space configurations.

Colorimetry metadata propagation issues are not unique to Jetson. In January 2023, a GitHub issue on the rigaya/NVEnc project reported color desaturation when encoding AV1 with HDR metadata on desktop NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 4090), where HDR10 metadata including mastering display and MaxCLL was not properly signaled in the AV1 bitstream. The NVEnc maintainer fixed the issue in version 7.13 by adding metadata at the container level as well as the bitstream level. That fix addressed desktop NVENC via the Video Codec SDK, a separate code path from the Jetson tegrav4l2 encoder — but it underscores that NVIDIA's colorimetry handling has had gaps across both its embedded and desktop encoder stacks.

More recently, in April 2026, NVIDIA forum moderators confirmed that the Jetson platform does not support the libnvidia-encode.so library used on desktop NVIDIA GPUs, and that developers must use the jetson_multimedia_api or GStreamer's nvv4l2h265enc plugin instead. This architectural separation means colorimetry fixes applied to desktop NVENC via driver updates do not automatically reach Jetson users, who depend on L4T release cycles for encoder improvements.