According to a report in FlatPanelsHD, Disney+ users throughout Europe are apparently reporting the loss of Dolby Vision and HDR10+ dynamic HDR formats on 4K video content streamed on the Disney+ service. Titles that previously streamed in 4K resolution with either Dolby Vision or HDR10+ dynamic HDR are now streaming in basic HDR10 static HDR instead. Disney+ users in Germany first started seeing the lack of Dolby Vision as early as December, 2025 and reports have spread since then to other European countries.

As of February 2026, Disney+ users in the United States are still able to watch select titles on the service in Dolby Vision HDR, but it remains unclear if this will continue to be true or if Disney will remove the technology from all markets. Some European customers have installed VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to spoof their geographic location, which fools the streaming service into thinking they are streaming from the United States in order to work around the issue. To be clear, we are not suggesting that affected customers take this action; we are simply reporting what some users have stated online.

The loss of Dolby Vision comes on the heels of a German court’s ruling in a patent dispute filed by InterDigital, Inc. against Disney+. InterDigital has claimed that Disney+ is currently in violation of a patent they own related to the streaming of video content using high dynamic range (HDR) technology. The German court agreed with the validity of the claim and granted an injunction against Disney+ in November of last year to cease using the alleged infringing technology to deliver HDR content. The timing of this injunction and the first reports of disappearing Dolby Vision appear to be more than coincidental.

Why It Matters

While having four times as many pixels in 4K (UHD) content compared to 1080p HD does results in a sharper picture, it’s the wider color gamut and high dynamic range capabilities of 4K/UHD content that make video content look more lifelike and vivid. But most consumer displays, including TVs and projectors, are unable to reproduce the full dynamic range and peak brightness that is used by studios to master movies and TV shows for consumer displays. A film may be mastered for peaks of 4,000 nits while a high quality OLED display may only be able to reproduce 1,000 or possibly 2,000 nit peaks. Attempting to display content mastered for 4,000 nits on a consumer display with lower peak brightness could result in loss of specular (bright) highlights, a loss of shadow detail or both.

Dynamic HDR formats like Dolby Vision and HDR10+ allow the content’s dynamic range to be adjusted at playback time on a scene by scene basis to fit the capabilities of the display. This allows consumers to see a better representation of the content creators’ “artistic intent” regardless of whether they’re watching on a DLP projector, an OLED TV or a MiniLED/LCD TV. By eliminating the dynamic HDR content options, Disney+ could be creating an inferior viewing experience for their customers, even though these customers are paying for a “premium” streaming experience.

When contacted for comment, a source at the company had this to add:

“Dolby Vision support for Disney+ content in several European countries is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We are actively exploring ways to restore it and will provide updates as soon as we can. 4K UHD and HDR support remain available on supported devices. HDR10+ has not ever been available in market in Europe to date, we expect it to be available soon.”

The Bottom Line

From Disney’s response, it appears that the company is aware of the issue and is attempting to deliver a solution to their customers. In the meantime, affected users can still access this content in 4K resolution with standard HDR10 HDR. And on TVs with good HDR tone mapping processing, results with HDR10 can be quite high quality. Still, there are many fans out there of Dolby Vision, and many TVs that do support Dolby Vision, but do not support HDR10+ nor have their own dynamic HDR tone mapping. We’re sure these customers would like to see Dolby Vision support restored in order to get the highest possible visual quality of their streamed content.

Today, Meta went to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The state claims that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by implementing design features and algorithms that created dangerous conditions for users. Now, more than two years after the case was filed, opening arguments have begun in Santa Fe.

It’s a big week for Meta in court: A landmark social media trial kicks off in California today as well, the nation’s first legal test of social media addiction. That case is part of a “JCCP”, or judicial council coordinated proceedings, that brings together many civil suits that focus on similar issues.

The plaintiffs in that case allege that social media companies designed their products in a negligent manner and caused various harms to minors using their apps. Snap, TikTok, and Google were named as defendants alongside Meta; Snap and TikTok have already settled. The fact that Meta has not means that some of the company’s top executives may be called to the witness stand in the coming weeks.

Meta executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, are not likely to testify live in the New Mexico trial. But the proceedings may still be noteworthy for a few reasons. It’s the first standalone, state-led case against Meta that has actually gone to trial in the US. It’s also a highly charged case alleging child sexual exploitation that will ultimately lean on very technical arguments, including what it means to “mislead” the public, how algorithmic amplification works on social media, and what protections Meta and other social media platforms have through Section 230.

And, while Meta’s top brass might not be required to appear in person, executive depositions and testimonies from other witnesses could still offer an interesting look at the inner workings of the company as it established policies around underage users and responded to complaints that claim it wasn’t doing enough to protect them.

Meta has so far given no indication that it plans to settle. The company has denied the allegations, and Meta spokesperson Aaron Simpson told WIRED previously, “While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments, we’re focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people…We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better.”

Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, a tech industry watchdog, said in an emailed statement that these two trials represent “the split screen of Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmares: a landmark trial in Los Angeles over addicting children to Facebook and Instagram, and a trial in New Mexico exposing how Meta enabled predators to use social media to exploit and abuse kids.”

“These are the trials of a generation,” Haworth added. “Just as the world watched courtrooms hold Big Tobacco and Big Pharma accountable, we will, for the first time, see Big Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg take the stand.”

The Cost of Doing Business

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed his complaint against Meta in December 2023. In it, he alleged that Meta proactively served underage users explicit content, enabled adults to exploit children on the platform, allowed Facebook and Instagram users to easily find child pornography, and allowed an investigator on the case, purporting to be a mother, to offer her underage daughter to sex traffickers.

The trial is expected to take place over seven weeks. Last week jurors were selected, a panel of 10 women and eight men (12 jurors and six alternates). New Mexico First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid is presiding over the case.

Seedance 2.0 says it generates ‘cinematic content’ with ‘seamless video extension and natural language control’.

TikTok parent company ByteDance launched the pre-release version of its new AI video model, called Seedance 2.0, over the weekend, sparking value growth of shares in Chinese AI firms.

Seedance 2.0 markets itself as a “true” multi-modal AI creator, allowing users to combine images, videos, audio and text to generate “cinematic content” with “precise reference capabilities, seamless video extension and natural language control”. The model is currently available to select users of Jimeng AI, ByteDance’s AI video platform.

The new Seedance model allows exporting in 2k with 30pc faster generation than the previous version 1.5, the company’s website read.

Swiss-based consultancy CTOL called it the “most advanced AI video generation model available”, “surpassing OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 in practical testing”.

Positive response to the Seedance 2.0 launch drove up shares in Chinese AI firms.

Data compiled by Bloomberg earlier today (9 February) showed publishing company COL Group Co hit its 20pc daily price ceiling, while Shanghai Film Co and gaming and entertainment firm Perfect World Co rose by 10pc. Meanwhile, the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index is up by 1.63pc at the time of publishing.

Consumer AI video generators have made leaps in advances in just a short period of time. The usual tells – blurry fingers, overly smooth and unrealistic skin and inexplainable changes from frame to frame – in AI videos are all becoming extremely hard to notice.

While rivalling AI video generator Sora 2 by OpenAI produces results with watermarks (although, there’s no shortage of tutorials on how to remove them), and Google’s Veo 3.1 comes with a metadata watermark called SynthID, Seedance boasts that its results are “completely watermark-free”.

The prevalence of advanced AI tools coupled with ease of access has opened the gates to a new wave of AI deepfakes, with the likes of xAI’s Grok at the centre of the issue.

Last month, the EU launched a new investigation into X to probe whether the Elon Musk-owned social media site properly assessed and mitigated risks stemming from its in-platform AI chatbot Grok after it was outfitted with the ability to edit images.

Users on the social media site quickly prompted the tool to undress people – generally women and children – in images and videos. Millions of such pieces of content were generated on X, The New York Times found.

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A Moscow-based startup has taken a big move into the area of animal-machine hybrids. Neiry, a Moscow-based neurotech company, claims to have already made progress on remotely operated pigeons by inserting electrodes into their brains.

In late 2025, there were reports of early flying tests in the city, in which the modified birds flew controlled routes before returning to base. The project is known as PJN-1, and while the company promotes it as a valuable tool for civilian occupations, this type of technology is gaining traction due to its potential for surveillance purposes.

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The surgeons utilize a specialized frame to delicately place these microscopic electrodes into specific areas of the pigeon’s brain. The electrodes are then linked to a mini-stimulator on the bird’s head. All of the bird’s electronics and navigation system are housed inside a lightweight backpack and powered by solar panels. A tiny camera is mounted on the bird’s chest to capture video. The operators can direct the bird to fly left or right by giving electrical signals to its brain. GPS devices, like a standard drone, track the bird’s location and control its trajectory. According to Neiry, the bird does not require training and may be operated immediately after the process, and the surgery has been reported to be 100% successful in terms of survival rate.

Pigeons have some significant advantages over regular drones in certain scenarios. For starters, they can fly hundreds of miles, perhaps 300 or more in a single day, without having to replace batteries or land frequently. They can simply navigate difficult environments, handle anything the weather throws at them, and even fit into small spaces. Neiry believes they can use pigeons to inspect pipelines or electrical lines, survey industrial regions, or assist with search and rescue efforts in difficult-to-reach areas. According to the company’s inventor, Alexander Panov, the same technology may be used with various birds, such as ravens for coastal monitoring, seagulls, or even albatrosses for operations over the ocean, as long as they can carry the burden and fly the distance required.
[Source]

A team of researchers led by Nvidia has released DreamDojo, a new AI system designed to teach robots how to interact with the physical world by watching tens of thousands of hours of human video — a development that could significantly reduce the time and cost required to train the next generation of humanoid machines.

The research, published this month and involving collaborators from UC Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and several other institutions, introduces what the team calls “the first robot world model of its kind that demonstrates strong generalization to diverse objects and environments after post-training.”

At the core of DreamDojo is what the researchers describe as “a large-scale video dataset” comprising “44k hours of diverse human egocentric videos, the largest dataset to date for world model pretraining.” The dataset, called DreamDojo-HV, is a dramatic leap in scale — “15x longer duration, 96x more skills, and 2,000x more scenes than the previously largest dataset for world model training,” according to the project documentation.

Inside the two-phase training system that teaches robots to see like humans

The system operates in two distinct phases. First, DreamDojo “acquires comprehensive physical knowledge from large-scale human datasets by pre-training with latent actions.” Then it undergoes “post-training on the target embodiment with continuous robot actions” — essentially learning general physics from watching humans, then fine-tuning that knowledge for specific robot hardware.

For enterprises considering humanoid robots, this approach addresses a stubborn bottleneck. Teaching a robot to manipulate objects in unstructured environments traditionally requires massive amounts of robot-specific demonstration data — expensive and time-consuming to collect. DreamDojo sidesteps this problem by leveraging existing human video, allowing robots to learn from observation before ever touching a physical object.

One of the technical breakthroughs is speed. Through a distillation process, the researchers achieved “real-time interactions at 10 FPS for over 1 minute” — a capability that enables practical applications like live teleoperation and on-the-fly planning. The team demonstrated the system working across multiple robot platforms, including the GR-1, G1, AgiBot, and YAM humanoid robots, showing what they call “realistic action-conditioned rollouts” across “a wide range of environments and object interactions.”

Why Nvidia is betting big on robotics as AI infrastructure spending soars

The release comes at a pivotal moment for Nvidia’s robotics ambitions — and for the broader AI industry. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, CEO Jensen Huang declared that AI robotics represents a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity, particularly for regions with strong manufacturing bases. According to Digitimes, Huang has also stated that the next decade will be “a critical period of accelerated development for robotics technology.”

The financial stakes are enormous. Huang told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on February 6 that the tech industry’s capital expenditures — potentially reaching $660 billion this year from major hyperscalers — are “justified, appropriate and sustainable.” He characterized the current moment as “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” with companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dramatically increasing their AI spending.

That infrastructure push is already reshaping the robotics landscape. Robotics startups raised a record $26.5 billion in 2025, according to data from Dealroom. European industrial giants including Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo have announced robotics partnerships in the past year, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed that 80 percent of his company’s future value will come from its Optimus humanoid robots.

How DreamDojo could transform enterprise robot deployment and testing

For technical decision-makers evaluating humanoid robots, DreamDojo’s most immediate value may lie in its simulation capabilities. The researchers highlight downstream applications including “reliable policy evaluation without real-world deployment and model-based planning for test-time improvement” — capabilities that could let companies simulate robot behavior extensively before committing to costly physical trials.

This matters because the gap between laboratory demonstrations and factory floors remains significant. A robot that performs flawlessly in controlled conditions often struggles with the unpredictable variations of real-world environments — different lighting, unfamiliar objects, unexpected obstacles. By training on 44,000 hours of diverse human video spanning thousands of scenes and nearly 100 distinct skills, DreamDojo aims to build the kind of general physical intuition that makes robots adaptable rather than brittle.

The research team, led by Linxi “Jim” Fan, Joel Jang, and Yuke Zhu, with Shenyuan Gao and William Liang as co-first authors, has indicated that code will be released publicly, though a timeline was not specified.

The bigger picture: Nvidia’s transformation from gaming giant to robotics powerhouse

Whether DreamDojo translates into commercial robotics products remains to be seen. But the research signals where Nvidia’s ambitions are heading as the company increasingly positions itself beyond its gaming roots. As Kyle Barr observed at Gizmodo earlier this month, Nvidia now views “anything related to gaming and the ‘personal computer’” as “outliers on Nvidia’s quarterly spreadsheets.”

The shift reflects a calculated bet: that the future of computing is physical, not just digital. Nvidia has already invested $10 billion in Anthropic and signaled plans to invest heavily in OpenAI’s next funding round. DreamDojo suggests the company sees humanoid robots as the next frontier where its AI expertise and chip dominance can converge.

For now, the 44,000 hours of human video at the heart of DreamDojo represent something more fundamental than a technical benchmark. They represent a theory — that robots can learn to navigate our world by watching us live in it. The machines, it turns out, have been taking notes.

Waymo has pulled the human safety driver from its autonomous test vehicles in Nashville, as the Alphabet-owned company moves closer to launching a robotaxi service in the city.

Waymo, which has been testing in Nashville for months, is slated to launch a robotaxi service there this year in partnership with Lyft. Riders will initially hail rides directly through the Waymo app. Once the service expands, Waymo will also make its self-driving vehicles available through the Lyft app. Lyft has said it will handle fleet services, such as vehicle readiness and maintenance, charging infrastructure, and depot operations, through its wholly owned subsidiary Flexdrive.

Waymo has accelerated its robotaxi expansion and today operates commercial services in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Phoenix. It also has driverless test fleets in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando.

The company tends to follow the same rollout strategy in every new market, starting with a small fleet of vehicles that are manually driven to map the city. The autonomous vehicles are then tested with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. Eventually, the company conducts driverless testing, often allowing employees to hail rides, before launching a robotaxi service.

House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has asked the US Department of Justice to turn over all its communications with both Apple and Google regarding the companies’ decisions to remove apps that shared information about sightings of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. Several apps that allowed people to share information about where they had seen ICE members were removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in October. Politico reported that Raskin has contacted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the issue and also questioned the agency’s use of force against protestors as it executes the immigration policy set by President Donald Trump.

“The coercion and censorship campaign, which ultimately targets the users of ICE-monitoring applications, is a clear effort to silence this Administration’s critics and suppress any evidence that would expose the Administration’s lies, including its Orwellian attempts to cover up the murders of Renee and Alex,” Raskin wrote to Bondi. He refers to Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were both fatally shot by ICE agents. In the two separate incidents, claims made by federal leaders about the victims and the circumstances of their deaths were contradicted by eyewitnesses or camera footage, echoing violent interactions and lies about them that occurred while ICE conducted raids in Chicago several months ago.

Another day, another wave of gaming layoffs. Today it’s Riot Games with the announcement that it’s cutting jobs on its pair-based fighting game 2XKO. For context, a representative from Riot confirmed to Game Developer that about 80 people are being cut, or roughly half of 2XKO’s global development team.

“As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO,” according to the blog post from executive producer Tom Cannon. “The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.”

The console launch for 2XKO happened last month. Cannon said the company’s plans for its 2026 competitive season have not altered with the layoffs. He added that Riot will attempt to place the impacted people at new positions within the company where possible.