I found a hidden Samsung video setting that makes all streaming apps appear to be playing on the movie screen

Samsung buries some of its best display features that most people will never pay attention to. The standard settings menu has a brightness slider and dark mode, and people usually stop there, thinking that’s all the phone can do. There’s a lot of hidden nooks and crannies on the phone, but there’s one setting that completely overrides the normal automatic brightness limit and pushes the display to its calibrated maximum output, and it does it automatically.

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You’ll need to delve into advanced features to find hidden toggles

You can tell a lot about your battery from your phone’s hidden diagnostics menu, but you’ll also find that Samsung tends to hide some display tricks that affect both screen appearance and power consumption. The big one is a feature called video brightness.

Dynamic AMOLED 2X Screens consume a lot of power and generate a lot of heat, so not all Samsung smartphones have this feature.

This setting is not in the normal display options, so you’ll have to do a little research. Please open settingClick and scroll past the normal display and battery items until you reach . advanced features.

If you tap there, you’ll see a bunch of additional tools. need to look for video brightness It’s there. You’ll understand once you enter. usually and bright mode.[標準]is the default and uses standard Android brightness behavior based on the ambient light sensor.

To actually turn this on, toggle from: usually to bright. Once you do this, a list will pop up showing all the compatible streaming apps you have installed. Apps like Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Twitch, Google TV, built-in video player, and more. Each app has its own toggle feature, so you can choose exactly which apps benefit.

Select the one you want and your phone’s brightness will be automatically adjusted every time you open that app and go full screen. Basically, it tells the system to ignore the normal automatic brightness limit and push the screen to its calibrated maximum brightness. This works even if you are using a custom launcher.

The moment you go full screen, it changes the way your phone handles video

The software just overrides everything to give you a better image

Holding an Android smartphone displaying Instagram Reels captions — Pankil Shah / MakeUseOf

When you open certain media apps on your high-end Samsung Galaxy smartphone, the software launches immediately to improve contrast and dramatically improve the appearance of colors. Samsung’s One UI is set to intervene the moment an approved streaming app goes full screen with video. Instead of letting the light sensor and normal auto-brightness system slowly adjust the screen, the window manager simply overrides the settings.

This is done using BRIGHTNESS_OVERRIDE_FULL. This temporarily ignores normal power saving settings and completely skips the phone’s normal automatic brightness behavior. Essentially, this tells the display to boost the sub-pixels to their highest calibrated brightness, setting up a very nice-looking image without you having to touch anything.

This automatic mode essentially makes your regular phone screen look more like a movie theater, without having to permanently change any settings yourself. When you’re watching HDR content, your phone switches to the wider DCI-P3 color range, which provides much deeper color depth and vibrancy than the standard sRGB range used for most media.

At the same time, bright spots such as explosions, reflections, and neon lights are boosted to very high brightness levels, so they look great. It also does tone mapping. This basically means the software looks at each frame and makes adjustments so that even dark scenes show detail and bright areas remain colorful.

Put it all together and you’ll receive a photo that’s as close to a calibrated theater screen as every frame looks as good as possible. That said, running a screen this bright will generate a lot of heat and drain your battery faster. Samsung knows this, which is why this feature is built to only work temporarily and only when it makes sense.

The software monitors user behavior. If you switch to split screen or open a pop-up window, the override is turned off so you don’t see uneven brightness or hot spots on the screen. Boosting will stop immediately if you close the media app or minimize the video.

Increasing the brightness like this takes too much power.

AA and AAA batteries next to Android smartphone showing battery settings — Amir Boruri / MUO

Setting the screen of a modern phone to its highest brightness setting always involves hardware trade-offs, primarily regarding power usage and heat. Brightness makes this possible because it increases the voltage sent to each individual organic subpixel. This additional current will give you brighter peak brightness and vibrant colors, but increasing the voltage that much will drain your battery faster.

This is not noticeable in short bursts, but becomes an issue during long viewing sessions. Higher current not only drains the battery faster; It also converts excess electrical energy into heat within the screen. This heats up the battery itself. Therefore, you should keep in mind that it can accelerate the chemical wear and tear of your phone’s lithium-ion battery.

Operating the display at such high voltage levels not only drains the battery faster, but also slightly increases the long-term risk of screen burn-in, also known as permanent image retention. Burn-in occurs because the red, green, and blue subpixels do not age at the same rate.

High voltage and heat will cause them to wear out faster than normal. This is especially a problem if you spend a lot of time watching something that has static, high-contrast elements on the screen, like Netflix’s bright white subtitles or the always-there TikTok navigation bar.

I have used a cell phone with burn-in before. It’s very annoying and really noticeable. I traded in my last phone for that very reason. Therefore, we recommend that you be very careful.

Adjust brightness without limits

Video brightness is a very useful feature if you watch a lot of content on your phone, but one thing to keep in mind is battery life. So if you’re constantly watching videos or streaming content that pushes your display to its limits, we don’t recommend this. However, you should use it if you find it useful or if you need it from time to time.