What color space does Zoom Meetings use?

[DeanH]

What colour space does Zoom Meetings use to transmit and to display? Is it Rec 709, sRGB or something else? Does anything change with screen share vs. non screen share, and with the Zoom app vs Zoom in a colour-aware browser? We’re teaching photography and colour editing, with presenters and participants all sharing screens for editing and all streaming directly from their cameras, with a mixture of MacOS and Windows. We’re trying to understand what colour and contrast shifts we should warn participants to expect.

My understanding/guess at the moment is that everyone’s feed is desaturated to fit within lowest-common-denominator Rec 709 (not sure what intent is used) and that’s what is beamed to everyone. It then seems to be presented in the Zoom app as-is, so everyone with a calibrated screen sees exactly the same desaturated colours. The plus of this approach is that everybody with a calibrated screen sees exactly the same colours, which is great for group work. The downside is that even those with good P3 screens can’t see what another user also with P3 screen is trying to show.

Does anyone have any corrections or extra insights or technical info?

[mcurl]

+1  We also would like access to some more technical information (and even control!) related to colorspace and video tuning. It is one of the main reasons Zoom can't be used as a primary review tool.

[Hannes_Famira]

I analyzed a recording in Invisor v.327 and it says the color space is YUV. I had to google it and it says that “YUV uses three values to represent a color: Y, U, and V. Y represents luma, or brightness, while U and V represent chrominance, or color. […] YUV is more efficient than RGB for video compression because it aligns with human vision sensitivity. This allows for significant reductions in bandwidth and storage requirements.”