hdr streaming How do people screenshare in HDR?

[Sawtaytoes]

How do people stream games in HDR to friends? When I say "stream", think Zoom screenshare, not Twitch.
 

I use Discord, and it only streams in SDR. When playing HDR games, everything is blown-out because Discord doesn't do any tone mapping.

 

This has got to be a super common problem now that many people have HDR-capable displays (even HDR400 does something). Windows 11 will automatically enable HDR for supported displays by default, so this issue will only get worse over time.

 

What solution do you use? Is there another video streaming client available? Is there anything I can use to tonemap native HDR game footage prior to streaming?

 

Windows Auto HDR + OBS Preview Window
I've been looking at solutions, and the only one I've come up with is to disable native HDR in the game and use Windows 11's Auto HDR feature w/ OBS's preview window. Doing that allows you to play in HDR while someone watching you only sees SDR. Pretty handy, but there are quite a few quirks.

 

OBS issues

1. OBS does not transfer game audio like Discord. This is the biggest issue with this method.
2. You have to put the preview window fullscreen to get the full res, and it's going to be choppier than native. It's also gonna need to be on a second monitor and can only get as large as that monitor's resolution.
3. You can put the preview in a window and minimize it, but it needs to be sized properly which will never be the same as native res.

Windows Auto HDR things to know

1. Auto HDR requires you enable HDR prior to opening the game (toggle HDR with WIN+ALT+B). Normally, Windows 11 will automatically switch Windows into HDR mode when playing a fullscreen HDR game, so you no longer have to do it manually like in Windows 10.
2. Auto HDR isn't supported in every game.
3. I'm not sure if Auto HDR will work in all games that have native HDR implementations. Auto HDR worked fine in Hitman 3, the game I'm testing.
4. Auto HDR runs in your SDR space, so it might be at 8-bit color if you haven't configured SDR for 10-bit. I manually configure this in the nVIDIA Control Panel, but it might do it automatically; who knows. Best to set it yourself to be sure.
   
5. Native HDR should always look better than Auto HDR because the game can do a lot more to make the native HDR presentation look good whereas Auto HDR can only use whatever's available in SDR land (typically only gamma and brightness).
6. If you use SpecialK to add HDR where Auto HDR isn't supported, you run into the same streaming issues as native HDR as it hooks into the game itself.
7. Auto HDR runs one step before the final output for your display (my assumption), so Windows is technically only running the SDR game. This is why streaming works.
8. Your monitor needs drivers for Windows, or it will default to 1499 nits. That results in ridiculous amounts of clipping and even HDR for YouTube videos will look oversaturated and blown-out. On my LG C1 OLED, I had to use Custom Resolution Utility (CRU) to set the peak brightness the HDMI EDID info. After doing so, all HDR in Windows looks amazing, even YouTube. Highly recommend you configure that regardless of Auto HDR.
   
9. The SDR brightness slider supposedly affects the resulting Auto HDR peak brightness. If you set it to the lowest value, it should result in a correct Auto HDR. I haven't verified this myself because it's difficult to compare when a game's native HDR has its own calibration setting that might not be accurate to the resulting output. For me, I leave this where I have it since it's close enough to 0, and I don't mind clipping if it's only on the brightest lights.
   

 

That's all about Auto HDR, but what about other folks? What are you using? I'm really curious.

[SimplyChunk]

How many of those do you think are HDR?

[Shimejii]

i would say you are VASTLY  over-estimating how many people HDR. Anything under 800-1000 Nits, is not really HDR and should not be classified as such. The vast majority just dont care for it when it comes at a much higher cost, and loss of certain features. 

 

Youll probably have to wait quiet a while before streaming HDR stuff via discord with some codec comes available, and since there is pretty much no demand for it, wont happen for a while

[Sawtaytoes]

I'd like to stay on topic and find an answer to my question.

 

Just because some people don't have HDR displays or because you think HDR is only good at 800-1000 nits doesn't mean my problem magically goes away.

 

Both I and the people I stream to have HDR displays, but Discord still transmits video as clipped SDR regardless.

I want to know if there's another, more reliable solution than Windows Auto HDR:

1. Is there a friend-streaming platform I could use instead of Discord with HDR support?
2. Is there a way to run the game through an SDR tonemapper and then send that video to Discord?

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, Sawtaytoes said:

I'd like to stay on topic and find an answer to my question.

 

Some of your questions are:

 

6 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

How do people stream games in HDR to friends?

6 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

what about other folks? What are you using? I'm really curious.

And what the posts above are about is that the answer to those is likely "they don't", hence the lack of answer to

 

6 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

What solution do you use?

 

 

[Sawtaytoes]

You can simply not respond if you don't know the answer.

I spent a long time writing a forum post and would appreciate people responding with solutions or something on-topic. Off-topic troll responses are only going to drive me away from LTT's forums because I'm never gonna find answers to my questions.

I want to know what people are using to stream HDR content. Only that and nothing else. I don't care about "proper HDR nits" or speculation about if others have HDR monitors because I do have them.

And even if literally no one else has HDR displays, I still have to tonemap it down for my own streaming because they have SDR.

 

---

I've been reading forums for 25 years. That first response will change the topic to "is HDR prevalent today" rather than "how do you stream HDR content?". It's more than off-topic; it's flame-war fodder. And guess what? 5 posts in, we're still discussing a topic completely different from what I asked.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I haven't tested this, since I neither have a proper HDR display nor do I use Discord to stream anything. But after doing some very perfunctory googling, I've stumbled accross a thread on the OBS forums that mentions that they apparently support HDR encoding along with SDR tonemapping in version 28. Unfortunately, that's not out yet, but you can get the beta here and the changelog mentions HDR support and SDR tonemapping: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases

[Sawtaytoes]

18 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I haven't tested this, since I neither have a proper HDR display nor do I use Discord to stream anything. But after doing some very perfunctory googling, I've stumbled accross a thread on the OBS forums that mentions that they apparently support HDR encoding along with SDR tonemapping in version 28. Unfortunately, that's not out yet, but you can get the beta here and the changelog mentions HDR support and SDR tonemapping: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases

Thanks for your response!

 

I'm looking to stream to friends and family like Zoom screensharing.

 

Does OBS have a way to share video feeds with friends?

[Sawtaytoes]

I'm updating my original post.

Windows 11's Auto HDR does allow streaming SDR content even though you're seeing HDR on your monitor, but there's a catch.

 

If you use Discord to share the game window, it doesn't work even with Auto HDR. I was testing using OBS the other night and sharing the OBS preview window to Discord. I forgot to directly capture the game in Discord.

 

When using OBS (older v27), it's "Game Capture" method grabs the SDR output before the Auto HDR pass. That's how it was working before. But when screensharing the OBS window, pretty sure Discord can't optimize it as well, and there's no game audio like there is when using Discord screen capture . My bad.

[Kilrah]

8 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

Does OBS have a way to share video feeds with friends?

OBS has a "virtual webcam" output that you can use in any video conf software.

[Sawtaytoes]

On 8/18/2022 at 3:45 AM, Kilrah said:

OBS has a "virtual webcam" output that you can use in any video conf software.

Yes, I've used the virtual webcam option.

 

That's in my first post under "Windows Auto HDR + OBS Preview Window". It's the only way I've gotten it to work, but it has a ton of drawbacks which are listed in that post. Here's a summary:

 

Quote

OBS issues

1. OBS does not transfer game audio like Discord. That's the biggest issue with this method.
2. You have to put the preview window fullscreen to get the full res, and it's going to be choppier than native. It's also gonna need to be on a second monitor and can only get as large as that monitor's resolution.
3. You can put the preview in a window and minimize it, but it needs to be sized properly which will never be the same as native res.

But let's say I got OBS v28 and turned on HDR mode. There are still a few issues even with it.

Since Discord can't stream HDR content, that means I need to enable the HDR -> SDR tone mapper in OBS. While that's great 'n all, it's extra processing I need to do on my end. That still doesn't solve the issue of a lack of game audio nor does it show my sister the video feed in HDR on her display.

I'm really looking for a solution where I can stream the HDR content directly. I want to load up an HDR game and have my sister able to watch the HDR version of that video feed over a streaming solution like Discord, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. If there's a Discord competitor (that includes game audio) with HDR support, that's what I'm wanting.

 

It's the same for her too. While I could load up Twitch or YouTube and somehow create a private stream (dunno if that's even a thing), she'd have to do the same if she wants to share a game with me.