Getting 8K VR180 onto Apple Vision Pro at full resolution is less about the headset and more about never letting the pipeline quietly downscale your master. This guide walks the whole path — ingest, encode, protect, deliver — the way we run it internally.

1. Start from the right master

Export a dual-fisheye or equirectangular master at the native sensor resolution. Do not pre-scale to 4K "to be safe" — every downscale before the encoder is a pixel you can't get back. ZeusXR ingests up to 8K per eye and treats the master as the ceiling, never the target.

2. Encode with the immersive profile

The encoder detects VR180 geometry and applies the immersive HEVC profile. On NVENC we drive quality with -cq, not -crf — they are different parameters and mixing them up is the most common way teams ship soft footage. Apple Spatial Video paths run through FFmpeg 7.1 specifically; older builds silently drop the spatial metadata.

3. Protect without degrading

DRM and anti-clone protection are applied at packaging time, not by re-encoding. Your bits are identical to the master; the protection wraps them. That means enabling protection costs you nothing in image quality.

4. Deliver through WebXR Media Layers

On Vision Pro the player requests a WebXR session with the layers feature and binds an equirect layer directly. This is the piece that unlocks true 8K: the frame goes to the compositor without passing through a WebGL texture that would cap it. No resolution ceiling, no re-projection tax.

The result

A shared link that opens in Safari on Vision Pro, drops into the headset, and plays your master at the resolution you shot it. If you see softness, it was introduced upstream — walk back through these four steps and you'll find the downscale.