Implementation Provenance and Source-Material Boundary

This project generates dynamic HDR metadata (Profile 8.1, CM v4.0, compatible with the Dolby Vision® format) from the public standards and open-source dependencies listed below. This document records where the domain knowledge in this repository comes from, so that the claim is auditable rather than asserted.

The repository implementation is intended to be independently derived from the public standards and identified open-source dependencies listed below. To the maintainer's knowledge, no Dolby proprietary source code, SDK, confidential documentation, leaked tooling, or material obtained in breach of a confidentiality obligation was copied into or used to derive the implementation. A licensed copy of the Dolby Vision Professional Tools has been used only for comparative output evaluation as described below; its code and documentation are not included or redistributed here.

This is a factual provenance statement, not a legal conclusion concerning copyright, trade secrets, patents, contractual rights, or freedom to operate.

What this project does NOT contain or use

• No Dolby Laboratories proprietary code, SDKs, lookup tables, tone curves, or binary blobs are included in this repository. The repository is auditable in full, and cargo deny gates dependency licenses in CI. (cargo deny checks dependency-license policy; it does not and cannot verify implementation provenance — that rests on the review record and this document.)
• No leaked or unlicensed Dolby tools. To the maintainer's knowledge this project does not use, invoke, or compare against leaked or informally circulated copies of Dolby professional tooling (such as the cm_analyze binary circulating in forums). Validation targets are the RPUs of retail releases (observable, shipped metadata), synthetic test patterns with mathematically known values, and — strictly for scoring output accuracy — a licensed copy of the Dolby Vision Professional Tools (see the validation boundary below).
• No reverse engineering of Dolby binaries. Behavioral reference is limited to public specs and the observable input/output of open-source tools.

Validation boundary for licensed Dolby tools

The maintainer holds a licensed copy of the Dolby Vision Professional Tools. Its role in this project is bounded and one-directional: its output may be used to score this project's measurements (published as accuracy numbers in docs/VALIDATION.md), and for nothing else. No Dolby tool output is used to derive, fit, or tune any algorithm or constant in this codebase; the implementation remains built from the public standards listed below, and every implementation decision must be traceable to them. Licensed Dolby software and its documentation are never redistributed through this repository.

This use remains subject to the applicable end-user license agreement; a provenance statement cannot override contractual restrictions.

License review (v5.6.4 EULA, reviewed 2026-07-31). The end-user license agreement presented by the v5.6.4 installer was read in full. It contains no benchmark or publication restriction — no clause limiting the publication of test results, comparative measurements, or performance data. Its restrictions cover copying, derivative works, reverse engineering, and commercial hosting, none of which describe measuring our own content and comparing the resulting statistics. Two terms do bound what may be published here, and this project observes both:

• Documentation is licensee-confidential and may not be republished (EULA §1.2). No Dolby manual, release note, or bundled license document is quoted, excerpted, or committed to this repository, and none ever should be.
• Confidential Information is defined broadly, extending to the software's documentation and proprietary information. Accordingly, published validation material is limited to derived statistics computed by this project — deltas, error distributions, and summary accuracy figures over our own test content — and never to the tool's documentation, its raw output files, or verbatim text from either.

Re-check this section on any major version upgrade of the licensed tool; the terms reviewed above are those of v5.6.4 and are not guaranteed to carry forward.

Public sources everything is built from

Area	Source
DV bitstream / RPU / composer metadata	ETSI GS CCM 001 V1.1.1 (public ETSI spec, "Compound Content Management")
Dynamic metadata semantics (L1 etc.)	SMPTE ST 2094-10 (published SMPTE standard)
PQ transfer function	SMPTE ST 2084 / ITU-R BT.2100
HLG transfer function	ARIB STD-B67 / ITU-R BT.2100
Tone-mapping reference (planned trims)	ITU-R BT.2390 (EETF)
Static HDR metadata (MaxCLL/MaxFALL)	CTA-861
madVR measurement file format	MIT-licensed madvr_parse by quietvoid
RPU authoring & injection	MIT-licensed dovi_tool by quietvoid (external, user-installed)
HDR10+ metadata extraction	MIT-licensed hdr10plus_tool by quietvoid (external, user-installed)

The boundary is strict: this project computes per-frame luminance statistics from decoded pixels and emits generic measurement data plus a configuration JSON; the RPU bitstream itself is authored entirely by dovi_tool, which the user installs independently.

Legal framing and its limits

• Copyright / trade secrets: to the maintainer's knowledge, nothing proprietary is copied or embedded, and all format knowledge in this repository derives from the published standards listed above. Under US federal law, independent derivation and lawful reverse engineering are excluded from "improper means"; EU law similarly permits independent creation and the study or testing of lawfully obtained products absent a valid duty to the contrary. Those provisions describe the method used here; they are not an adjudication of any claim, and they do not displace obligations arising under a license agreement.
• Patents: no patent search, claim analysis, licensing determination, or freedom-to-operate review has been performed. Independent development, public documentation, and open-source licensing do not establish non-infringement of patents — independent creation is generally not a defense to direct patent infringement. Dolby holds patents in the HDR metadata space, including on the generation side. This project makes no representation that making, using, distributing, or operating the software is licensed under or free from third-party patent rights.
• Trademarks: Dolby, Dolby Vision, and the double-D symbol are trademarks of Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation. HDR10+ is a trademark of HDR10+ Technologies, LLC. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, certified by, approved by, or licensed by either. References are nominative — describing compatibility and interoperability only. The converter binary is deliberately named mkvdovi rather than after the mark.

This project therefore never claims "no IP infringement" as an absolute, and does not present this document as a legal opinion. What it does record, and what the sources above make auditable, is the method: an independent implementation of public standards, with no Dolby code, confidential material, or leaked tooling used to derive it.