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Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Show off your HTPC builds, NAS Servers, and any other hardware. Great place to ask for hardware help too.
Manni
Posts: 593
Joined: Wed May 22, 2019 5:27 am

Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Manni » Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:05 am

Hi Paul,

A couple of things:

1) As long as you don't use the red foxy for piracy (which I don't condone or approve of either) but simply to unlock your original disks for playback or ripping, I really don't see why it's a problem to use it that way, as it makes it possible to not have to use PowerDVD, which is a poor player for the reasons explained below. It doesn't matter if you rip to unprotected ISO/folders or if you play the physical disk, if you unlock the disks then you don't have to follow any of the SGX nonsense and you can freely choose your hardware (and use for playback the same PC as you use for ripping, if you use UHD friendly drives and NOT officially SGX approved drives).

2) PowerDVD is a poor player especially for HDR because it doesn't support madVR. jRiver is my player of choice because it supports both full BD menus AND madVR. AFAIK there is no other standalone player that does that. I rip all my 2D disks to BD folders because I want the Oppo 203 clone to be able to play them when using network playback with the MyMovies iPad app. It's unable to play files with remote playback, unlike my Dune HD Pro Vision 4K Solo. Otherwise ripping to unprotected ISOs works best for me (for example for 3D Blurays, though I use my external player to play them as nVidia has stopped supporting 3D MVC).

3) Forget about AMD GPUs for HTPC use. Their drivers are full of bugs. Unfortunately, nVidia is the only sensible option. I have a 3090 with my AMD 5950X and it works fine. AMD CPUs are fine of course, unlike with SGX.

4) I highly recommend to use madVR as a renderer because it has the best HDR tonemapping for projectors (miles better than PowerDVD), this will really help you to play titles mastered above 1,000nits. You don't need 10,000nits, but many title are mastered to 4,000nits and you want the best way to tonemap them to whatever peak brightness your projector offers. That's what madVR does (along with best upscaling and more). It's dynamic tonemapping, which means that it can display dark scenes just as well as bright scenes, dark titles just as well as bright titles. Your Optoma (like most other projectors to the exception of recent JVCs) most likely does static tonemapping, which means that you have to manually select the correct setting for each title, and even then some scenes will be too bright and others will be too dark, because even if it uses the static metadata for the whole disc to decide what settings to use, scene brightness obviously varies during a film. Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are trying to address this with dynamic metadata, but none is necessary with madVR, which does better from plain HDR10.

5) madVR also support 3D LUT calibration (with Calman, Colorspace or the free DisplayCAL), which means that you can get very advanced correction and a reference picture.

I don't have the time to develop each of these points (many of them are rabbit holes that can take dozens if not hundred of hours to get right) but hopefully this will give you an idea of what to research if you'd like to improve significantly the picture quality and accuracy of your system.

Hope this helps!

Jamie
Posts: 942
Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:26 pm

Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Jamie » Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:00 pm

Manni wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:05 am
Hi Paul,

A couple of things:

1) As long as you don't use the red foxy for piracy (which I don't condone or approve of either) but simply to unlock your original disks for playback or ripping, I really don't see why it's a problem to use it that way, as it makes it possible to not have to use PowerDVD, which is a poor player for the reasons explained below. It doesn't matter if you rip to unprotected ISO/folders or if you play the physical disk, if you unlock the disks then you don't have to follow any of the SGX nonsense and you can freely choose your hardware (and use for playback the same PC as you use for ripping, if you use UHD friendly drives and NOT officially SGX approved drives).

Hi Manny,

I believe that Paul doesn't want to have a foxy discussion on the CMC forum in depth so that he won't have the studios targeting him. I agree with what you say on piracy and I think Paul would agree in spirit. I buy all my videos, dvd, bluray, uhd too but the studios still call us pirates. Because of this, Paul tries to not call out so called piracy programs directly.
Last edited by Jamie on Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Pauven
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Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Pauven » Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:06 pm

Jamie wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:00 pm I believe that Paul doesn't want to have a foxy discussion on the CMC forum in depth so that he won't have the studios targeting him.
No concerns here. Manni followed my example, kept the conversation very high-level, didn't promote piracy, and didn't provide URLs. All good.
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Jamie
Posts: 942
Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:26 pm

Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Jamie » Sun Jun 19, 2022 7:11 pm

Hi Paul,

I don't know how busy you are on other projects, but if you do have some time, I was wondering if you have had any more information on how to setup a htpc for 4k and HDR use. I thought you had a calibaration tutorial for HDR calibration on the forum but I have not been able to track it down. Maybe I was dreaming it. :lol:

I was wondering whether you are still using windows 11 for your HTPC and whether they have delivered the HDR calibration app as described in this article. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/ ... ation-app/

I was also wondering what cpu, motherboard and gpu you would recommend now for a 4k UHD HTPC? I may try putting one together in the next couple of months. This will serve as a server as well as a htpc. I will be running premiere, photoshop, mymovies, cmc, ripping blurays, uhd disks, audio cds "for backup".

Hope all is well.


Jamie

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Pauven
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Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
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Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Pauven » Wed Jun 22, 2022 6:38 pm

Hey Jamie,

I've been too busy to deal with HDR. My projector came out with a firmware update, which blew away all my settings, but looks much better out of the box. I have turned off HDR on the PC, and with what I've been watching lately (non HDR content) it looks better this way. HDR is always lackluster on projectors anyway...

I don't know if they released the HDR calibration app, but I am still using Win11.

As long as you're cool like a red fox, I would stick with Nvidia for the GPU. I saw in the news today that you can now find 3080's for under $600, IIRC. That has plenty of horsepower for driving all the visual enhancements you could ever want. For CPU, you can do pretty much anything you desire. If you are doing Premiere and Photoshop, you do want some horsepower, so something in the higher end from AMD or Intel.

Things are well here, I'm just incredibly busy. In the middle of a master bath remodel, prepping another home for sale, finishing up my new pinball machine for a trade show in a few weeks, and going live on a year long project this weekend. I would love some downtime...
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Jamie
Posts: 942
Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:26 pm

Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting

Post by Jamie » Wed Jun 22, 2022 7:31 pm

Hi Paul,
Thank you for your answer to my question and taking a few minutes away from your schedule. I hope all your projects work out fine and that you are able to find some downtime between projects.

Jamie

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