Long-standing Fairphone video color-space metadata bug — reproduced on FP3, FP4 and FP6

Discuss The Products
, , , , , ,
1

I have found a reproducible issue with videos recorded on several Fairphone generations: the MP4 container and the H.264 video stream can contain conflicting color-space metadata.

I have reproduced this on:

  • Fairphone 3
  • Fairphone 4
  • Fairphone (Gen. 6)

The issue is also still present on a video recorded on 28 August 2026 with /e/OS 4.2 / Android 16.

I already reported it to /e/OS here:

I have also contacted the Fairphone Support on Oct 31st 2025, who replied:

We’ve forwarded the feedback to the relevant team.

We thank you for flagging this issue.
This will help our software team tackle the problem.

As a smaller team, we won’t be able to offer any further updates on the status of this issue. Instead, we recommend keeping the device updated with the Latest [u]Fairphone[/u][u] OS[/u] at all times and checking the Fairphone Release Notes for more information about what’s contained in each update.

What is wrong?

For example, MediaInfo can show:

Color range                         : Limited
colour_range_Original               : Full

Transfer characteristics            : BT.709
transfer_characteristics_Original   : BT.601

Matrix coefficients                 : BT.601
matrix_coefficients_Original        : BT.470 System B/G

In other words, the MP4 container says one thing while the encoded H.264 stream says another.

This matters because different software may trust different metadata. A player, editor or transcoder may therefore interpret the same video differently.

I noticed this when transcoding Fairphone videos with FFmpeg: the resulting HEVC file can inherit the H.264 stream values and end up marked as Full range / BT.601-style, even though the original MP4 container says Limited range.

Can others reproduce this?

It would be especially useful to test videos recorded with stock Fairphone OS, to find out whether this is specific to /e/OS or comes from the Fairphone camera/video encoding stack.

If you can test, please post:

  • Fairphone model
  • OS
  • Android version
  • camera app
  • relevant MediaInfo output

I would be particularly interested in results from FP5 and from stock Fairphone OS.

Since this issue appears on multiple Fairphone generations and is still present on FP6, I hope it can be investigated so it does not continue into future devices.

2 Likes