Re: Adventures in 4K UHD + HDR Troubleshooting
Posted: 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!
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!