[Jaruzel]

Does anyone know how well this works?

I have a real-world use case: I have a full Atmos audio setup (7.1.4) and a projector for video. Now projectors don't do HDR very well[1], and to be honest I'm more interested in immersive audio than shiny highlights in the picture.

Unfortunately, a good few film disc releases only put the Atmos audio on the UHD disk along with HDR and running those disks through my rig and forcing SDR yields a picture that is too dark compared to the original HD SDR copy (and letting it try HDR isn't much better).

So I'm wondering if this will enable me to rip and convert to a good SDR UHD copy of a film with the Atmos audio ?

--

[1] ...and 100 inch OLED TVs are stupidly expensive.

[Veliladon]

It looks too dark because you're forcing light levels on a curve that goes up to 10,000 nits through a device that has linear gamma and is probably over an order of magnitude dimmer. This process should help because it's manually remapping HDR reference white to Rec. 709/sRGB max white, transforming the curve back into linear, and forcing the display to clip anything brighter to max white which is an acceptable way of doing things when compressing a gamut.

Your output device's color space needs to match the color space the display device expects. We've been in an SDR world of everything being sRGB/Rec. 709 for so long we don't even realize when something is putting out a mismatched color space. Normally if you have something like an Apple TV it'll do the transform automatically from whatever the media is to the color space of the screen it's connected to but if you're using something like a PC that assumes sRGB and force video in the BT.2020 color space out at sRGB levels you're going to have a bad time.

[Jaruzel]

Thanks for that info. I'm currently putting the discs into a mid-range Panasonic UHD player, which is supposed to be able to convert HDR to SDR properly, but clearly it's not doing a good job of it.