4K HDR Blu Ray - Is it worth it?

[nicklmg]

Buy 4K HDR Blu Rays on Amazon: http://geni.us/05cCs

 

Is the latest "upgrade" from the entertainment industry truly a step in the right direction, or is it another half-baked semi-upgrade solely designed to outdate your current home theater setup?

 

 

[Guest]

I can watch Star Wars in 4K HDR

 

 

[The Sloth]

its so expensive but i think it will be worth it once its cheaper. 

[doomsriker]

Nope it's usually not. 

 

 

[mcraftax]

And I'm watching movies on dvds on my 7 inch 480p dvd player  

[The Ran]

Why is it that "HDR" requires a supported display? It's not like the display actually has an increased dynamic range (except for that OLED one), it's just different processing on the image. Surely if I was to get a 4k Bluray drive and connect it to my computer, or a separate player and hook it up to my monitor (which probably has better image quality than most 4k TVs) I should be able to watch a "HDR" film. Or am I missing something here? I didn't take any notice after 1080p Blurays.

[AshleyAshes]

37 minutes ago, The Ran said:

Why is it that "HDR" requires a supported display? It's not like the display actually has an increased dynamic range (except for that OLED one), it's just different processing on the image. Surely if I was to get a 4k Bluray drive and connect it to my computer, or a separate player and hook it up to my monitor (which probably has better image quality than most 4k TVs) I should be able to watch a "HDR" film. Or am I missing something here? I didn't take any notice after 1080p Blurays.

The HDR information sent out of the player uses a colorspace that a TV would have to support as well as additional metadata that is important for controlling the dynamic range.  An unsupported display would be unable to process the signal it's ingesting.  That said, you could use a separate player on ANY display. but without that display communicating support for HDR to the player, the player would 'down sample' the image to an SDR Rec709 signal instead.  You'd gain no benefits from the HDR features of the media.

 

On a side note, you currently can't get a UHD BD drive for your PC.  While Linus states it's BDXL, that is not entirely correct, it's a minor variant of BDXL and currently no commercially available BD-ROM drives with BDXL support can read UHD BD discs.  There's also no means to run a UHD BD disc on PC yet, there are no commercial software players (And there may never be any) and the opensource/encryption hacking front has a long, long, LONG way to go.

[LudwigVonSneider]

All the HDR reviews I've seen, including this one, are a bit problematic because we don't really know how close the standard bluray trasfer is to the 4k one.

There can be massive quality difference between different blurays of the same movie. Bitrate, noise reduction, color timing, encoding, the list goes on.

 

Sure you can compare if the HDR UHD looks better than the bluray, but saying that a specific thing is better because of HDR or resolution can be often wrong.

For example, Linus mentioned the night sky in Sicario having banding issues on the bluray, but not on the UHD. This is more than often the result of higher bitrate and thus has possibly nothing to do with HDR or resolution. You can see this in caps-o-holic's comparison of two different bluray releases of Sicario: 

http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=7330&d2=7548&s1=69622&s2=71759&i=8&l=1

Lionsgate release has higher bitrate and less banding.

[The Ran]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

The HDR information sent out of the player uses a colorspace that a TV would have to support as well as additional metadata that is important for controlling the dynamic range.  An unsupported display would be unable to process the signal it's ingesting.  That said, you could use a separate player on ANY display. but without that display communicating support for HDR to the player, the player would 'down sample' the image to an SDR Rec709 signal instead.  You'd gain no benefits from the HDR features of the media.

 

On a side note, you currently can't get a UHD BD drive for your PC.  While Linus states it's BDXL, that is not entirely correct, it's a minor variant of BDXL and currently no commercially available BD-ROM drives with BDXL support can read UHD BD discs.  There's also no means to run a UHD BD disc on PC yet, there are no commercial software players (And there may never be any) and the opensource/encryption hacking front has a long, long, LONG way to go.

All the HDR processing is happening inside the player, right? If so I don't see why it then can't simply send the video out to any display. If not and the display is further processing the image then I don't get why it would do that.

 

With a HDR display there's not actually anything special or different with the panel itself, the source video's dynamic range is just being squashed so that the display can actually show it. This sort of thing has existed for ages, for example the Half-Life Lost Coast demo did it back in 2004. Really the player shouldn't even need to be HDR specific, why would the processing need to happen in the player instead of having a pre-processed video already on the disc?

 

By the way it's obvious you know a lot more about this shit than me, sorry if I'm sounding like a major dumb arse.

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, The Ran said:

All the HDR processing is happening inside the player, right? If so I don't see why it then can't simply send the video out to any display. If not and the display is further processing the image then I don't get why it would do that.

 

With a HDR display there's not actually anything special or different with the panel itself, the source video's dynamic range is just being squashed so that the display can actually show it. This sort of thing has existed for ages, for example the Half-Life Lost Coast demo did it back in 2004. Really the player shouldn't even need to be HDR specific, why would the processing need to happen in the player instead of having a pre-processed video already on the disc?

 

By the way it's obvious you know a lot more about this shit than me, sorry if I'm sounding like a major dumb arse.

No, I don't think you understand.

 

You're confusing what Half-Lost Lost Coast did, which was 'Tone Mapping' and can be seen in 'HDR' photography, where tone mapping is then used to represent a high dynamic range within a much more limited dynamic range with this kind of HDR.  HDR in this context is not tone mapping.  The player is decoding video that is stored in an entirely different color space that all but the most recent televisions do not support the processing of and it also includes additional metadata for controlling the luminance of the display.

 

A tone mapped HDR image is still an image that is represented in SDR.  Now it is possible for a UHD BD player to offer the feature of on the fly tone mapping of an HDR image to SDR for usage on a SDR display but that'd be a feature on some models.  The normal behavour is to just crush things down to SDR while any benefits of HDR are lost.

[Freeman]

Could you zoom in on some of those comparison frames in the next videos on this subject. They may not be a good way to relay the color depth difference, but at least we would be able to see the difference in detail.

[The Ran]

54 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

No, I don't think you understand.

 

You're confusing what Half-Lost Lost Coast did, which was 'Tone Mapping' and can be seen in 'HDR' photography, where tone mapping is then used to represent a high dynamic range within a much more limited dynamic range with this kind of HDR.  HDR in this context is not tone mapping.  The player is decoding video that is stored in an entirely different color space that all but the most recent televisions do not support the processing of and it also includes additional metadata for controlling the luminance of the display.

 

A tone mapped HDR image is still an image that is represented in SDR.  Now it is possible for a UHD BD player to offer the feature of on the fly tone mapping of an HDR image to SDR for usage on a SDR display but that'd be a feature on some models.  The normal behavour is to just crush things down to SDR while any benefits of HDR are lost.

So what is this new HDR actually doing differently, that's preventing it from working on a non HDR display? All I can think of is it's varying the backlight level, is that what you mean by "luminance of the display"? Is it some sort of sectioned backlight that can have a varied brightness across the panel? If it's not the latter then it still a SDR display and no different to existing non HDR displays. 

[Luscious]

Interesting discussion since I just upgraded to a 4K smart TV only a few months ago. But it wasn't to watch 4K discs since I moved over to Blu rays from DVD at the same time too. I use the TV to network with my main PC and stream MKV files from a 30TB RAID array. It works well, and means I don't need a dedicated HTPC.

 

But as Linus said, you cannot play back 4K on PC, nor can you get 4K burners or software. That's the reason I have yet to jump on the 4K bandwagon, and will be happy ripping MKV files until the entertainment industry imbeciles come to their senses.

 

As for streaming, it IS NOT the future and never will be. Not when every upgrade in quality requires increasing bandwidth that the ISP companies overcharge for and throttle relentlessly. And not when outlets like Netflix still cannot offer a sensible choice in their streaming catalog, adding movies but also removing titles and then blaming the studios for taking away THEIR streaming rights. The consumer is always irrelevant.

[Eyal]

Personally I don't particularly get excited for movies (since I don't watch movies or shows very often). What I want is actual HDR experience for gaming.

Higher brightness with wider colour gamut and dynamic metadata for gaming should be amazing.

Think about a dark scene in a game lit by a few candles and the torch you are holding. You can see the highlight between the darker parts and the minute detail despite it still being dark, as well as the brighter parts near the fire without being "overexposed". Seeing the actual flame with detail while seeing the slight difference between different dark and darker parts on the screen is actually exciting.

 

How long do you think it will take until we get reasonably priced OLED true HDR monitors with high brightness, superwide colour gamut and higher than 60Hz (I would like to ask for 120Hz, but it might be too much to ask from Displayport 1.4 without compression).

With CES coming, we will surely see some HDR PC monitors, LG already announced an HDR monitor (not OLED).

[AshleyAshes]

35 minutes ago, The Ran said:

So what is this new HDR actually doing differently, that's preventing it from working on a non HDR display? All I can think of is it's varying the backlight level, is that what you mean by "luminance of the display"? Is it some sort of sectioned backlight that can have a varied brightness across the panel? If it's not the latter then it still a SDR display and no different to existing non HDR displays. 

It's two things.  It is support for the Rec2020 color space, which has a much much wider color gamut than Rec709 or Rec601 color spaces like you like you see on most comtemporary digital video formats.  It's also worth noting that your desktop windows PC isn't running either of these colorspaces either but a different colorspace with a somewhat wider gamut than Rec709, the sRGB colorspace.

 

So, let me make this 100% clear; The data contains much more color data.  Before you ask, this isn't just like going from 8bpc (8bit) color to 10bpc or 12bpc, because you can also do these in other colorspaces, but also the possible colurs that can be represented in the data is much greater.  Use this image to try and understand, it more or less explains what ranges of colors that Rec709 can represent compared to Rec2020 can represent:

 

 

 

Sorry, I couldn't find an example that also included the sRGB gamut as well, but it's a bit wider than 709.  This Rec2020 color gamut is a kind of data that a display must support and most displays do not support this, only very recent televisions support it and desktop PC monitors with Rec2020 support are only due to be announced at CES next month.  A TV without Rec2020 support has no idea what Rec2020 is and is not able to process that color data.  For an SDR display to ingest Rec2020 images it would need be crushed down and converted to something it does understand, typically sRGB or Rec709 (Depending on the kind of display and the hardware sending the image).

 

Asside from that, yes, it is metadata which can control the back light of the display to basically represent the gamma curve of the image so through both luminance control of the back light and chrominance control with the actual pixels of the display combine to give a much wider range of color and brightness in the image.

 

I think the problem here is that you don't understand the concept of color space and failing to comprehend that leaves you unable to comprehend the implications and technicalities of HDR using a different colorspace.

[The Ran]

10 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

It's two things.  It is support for the Rec2020 color space, which has a much much wider color gamut than Rec709 or Rec601 color spaces like you like you see on most comtemporary digital video formats.  It's also worth noting that your desktop windows PC isn't running either of these colorspaces either but a different colorspace with a somewhat wider gamut than Rec709, the sRGB colorspace.

 

So, let me make this 100% clear; The data contains much more color data.  Before you ask, this isn't just like going from 8bpc (8bit) color to 10bpc or 12bpc, because you can also do these in other colorspaces, but also the possible colurs that can be represented in the data is much greater.  Use this image to try and understand, it more or less explains what ranges of colors that Rec709 can represent compared to Rec2020 can represent: 

 

Sorry, I couldn't find an example that also included the sRGB gamut as well, but it's a bit wider than 709.  This Rec2020 color gamut is a kind of data that a display must support and most displays do not support this, only very recent televisions support it and desktop PC monitors with Rec2020 support are only due to be announced at CES next month.  A TV without Rec2020 support has no idea what Rec2020 is and is not able to process that color data.  For an SDR display to ingest Rec2020 images it would need be crushed down and converted to something it does understand, typically sRGB or Rec709 (Depending on the kind of display and the hardware sending the image).

 

Asside from that, yes, it is metadata which can control the back light of the display to basically represent the gamma curve of the image so through both luminance control of the back light and chrominance control with the actual pixels of the display combine to give a much wider range of color and brightness in the image.

 

I think the problem here is that you don't understand the concept of color space and failing to comprehend that leaves you unable to comprehend the implications and technicalities of HDR using a different colorspace.

So the panels themselves are actually better than current ones? That makes sense now, due to the use of the HDR term I thought it was just a brightness thing and achieved through tone mapping.

 

So, how would Rec2020 compare to a decent 10bit IPS monitor (what I have, P2415Q)? Would it ever be possible in the future for such a monitor to display these HDR films as they were intended to be?

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, The Ran said:

So the panels themselves are actually better than current ones? That makes sense now, due to the use of the HDR term I thought it was just a brightness thing and achieved through tone mapping.

 

So, how would Rec2020 compare to a decent 10bit IPS monitor (what I have, P2415Q)? Would it ever be possible in the future for such a monitor to display these HDR films as they were intended to be?

A contemporary desktop monitor, even if 10bit, would still be limited by the sRGB colorspace which is used on the Windows desktop and it would still not be able to process an HDR signal in terms of luminance.  While crushing Rec2020 down to sRGB would give you some better color representation in comparison to Rec709 media files that's really the only benefit and it would be pretty insignificant.  Desktop PC games already run in the sRGB colorspace natively.

 

As for future monitors, sure, they are in pre-announced states for CES already even.  This however is also dependent on a GPU capable of Rec2020 HDR output and also for Microsoft Windows to support Rec2020 HDR, which is not expected until the 'Creators Update' due in 'Early 2017'.  But it's totally going to happen because, really, computer monitors and televisions are all the same thing, they're just minor variants of the same technology.  But HDR content came to the television before it came to the desktop PC, so TVs were the front runner,

[JFischer00]

@nicklmg, I was watching the video and at 1:53, I wondered what "ATOMOS" was. After a quick google, turns out it's supposed to be "ATMOS" (no extra "O"), which makes sense.

[ahuckphin]

Linus, did you change your home theater PC case to the Silverstone SG13 (3:45)

[zMeul]

I call bull

why? there are couple of examples in Linus' video where the BluRay image is quite notably blurrierrier - to me it indicates that either the master is not the same or the people that processed the BluRay version are total fucktards

the Life of Pi side by side is the most telling:

 

 

in PC gaming analogy is like they used blur to mask off lower res textures

[Ciccioo]

I don't really understand why i can see the difference between non-HDR and HDR content... on my non-HDR monitor. Can somebody explain that to me?

 

I also compared my mkv of "life of pi" to the footage shown in linus' video... my shadows are looking good. I think that the blue-ray content only looks bad because the tv's settings are terribly messed up.

i don't think this ltt's video is a good demo/comparison because i just can't see hdr on my screen, and ltt's post production color correction just violates everything.

 

am i missing something?

 

 

[zMeul]

29 minutes ago, Ciccioo said:

aI don't really understand why i can see the difference between non-HDR and HDR content... on my non-HDR monitor. Can somebody explain that to me?

 

Spoiler

 

the monitor needs to be capable to interpret and display the HDR data, it's not the same as standard color definition

 

take it for example from white to black, a standard display is capable of interpreting a limited number of shades of gray

while a HDR display can understand more

 

here's the perfect example:

 

oh sorry, I thought you asked something else 

 

well .. you aren't seeing actual HDR, but the closest approximation to it

you need to understand the BluRay movie is already compressed data - think of it like JPEG image vs RAW 

[Ciccioo]

10 minutes ago, zMeul said:

the monitor needs to be capable to interpret and display the HDR data, it's not the same as standard color definition

so i can't see hdr stuff on my screen... now my question is why is the video showing me differences, if i shouldn't be able to see any?

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, Ciccioo said:

so i can't see hdr stuff on my screen... now my question is why is the video showing me differences, if i shouldn't be able to see any?

see my updated post, I originally though you asked something else

you aren't actually seeing HDR

[stealth80]

I had a couple of issues with this video, even though it was quite good:

 

1) Atmos is not actually that intrusive vs a standard 5.1 or 7.1 set up. Dolby actually say it is preferable to use Atmos upward firing speakers as they create more of an immersive layer than the direct firing overhead ceiling speakers do. If you have an atmos capable receiver its just a simple matter of running a few extra cables and sitting the front atmos on the top of existing front speakers and finding a suitable position for the rears (if going 5.4.1 or 7.4.1)

 

2) I don't feel that using an XBOX One S as a source for 4K HDR on such a high end TV makes any sense, at all .... The current source match for that set would be something like the THX approved Panasonic UB900 or the newly released OPPO UDP-203 (good luck finding one)