Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.

Coming to Wayland Protocol's staging area is the color-representation protocol, which is around letting clients provide metadata about its YCbCr buffer contents.

The [1]merge request for color-representation has been two years in the making and led by Sebastian Wick. The color-representation protocol allows for the metadata to define the alpha mode, color model, and sub-sampling and quantization range for interpreting buffer contents. With these additions it can help in converting YCbCr pixel formats to RGB.

There is already pending code for color-representation by the KDE KWin, GNOME Mutter, and Weston compositors. There is also color-representation use ready by GStreamer and the MPV media player. This is another step forward for improving color management / HDR under Wayland.

With color-representation now merged into Wayland Protocols, it opens the door for compositors and apps to take off in their support for it. The color-representation protocol is the main addition of [2]Wayland Protocols 1.44 .



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/183

[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2025-April/044161.html