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Windows 10 + JRVR + HDR

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stevep30:
Hi,

I am running my desktop with HDR which is connected to a LG OLED TV and this is the only monitor / TV that is connected.

When using Theatre View, everything looks colourful and bright.

When watching 4K HDR movies everything looks good - TV detects HDR content correctly.

When playing SDR content the TV still thinks it has got HDR content ( even though JRVR states that the output is SDR), so when dark scenes come up, the blacks are crushed and the scene becomes very blocky, which I understand why.

I have waited until MC29 as I thought this might have been cured, as I think that the OS HDR should be disabled when playing SDR content and re-enabled when the SDR content has finished?

Hendrik:
Running your desktop as HDR is not recommended, and not something we have any automatic switching for. Instead, if you were to run your desktop in SDR, MC would turn on HDR if you play HDR content. That way everything would look right.

stevep30:
OK, no problem. This method does work, just thought I would ask.

bogdanbz:
I'm not Hendrik, but I'm quite sure if HDR is enabled in Windows, then it's supposed to stay enabled no matter what content type you are watching.

From a reply I got after I mentioned SDR extras on UHD HDR Blu-ray discs don't look good when viewed in JRVR, I discovered that JRVR relies on the fact that Windows DWM will handle the color transforms of sRGB back-buffer contents to wide gamut HDR. So yeah, JRVR will create sRGB back-buffers to store its output, which is why the OSD shows SDR as the output.

But this raises a situation that I'm not sure is handled well: sRGB data is supposed to be stored already encoded using the sRGB gamma function, so the tone mapping done by Windows interprets the starting data as being pre-encoded using the sRGB gamma function and maps it to HDR10 color values. This tone mapping done by the DWM is not doing an additional "darkening" of the input image which is what an SDR TV that is applying an inverse 2.4 gamma function (or the BT1886 function) is doing.

In your case however, the "too dark" image is likely because the display is crushing the blacks too much in HDR mode. You can try to mitigate this by using the HDR to SDR white-point setting by moving the slider in the Windows HD Color settings (just type that while the Start menu is open).

Hendrik:
Windows 10 is not that great in converting SDR content to HDR. I'm told Windows 11 is much improved in that area, for what its worth, and many people are happy to leave HDR mode active.

And of course JRVR behaves identically with SDR content no matter what windows is set to, so if it looks good in SDR mode, but not when Windows is in HDR mode, the fault does lie with Windows.

Windows 10 seems to process 2D applications more or less fine, but for some reason any advanced (3D) rendering is not processed well, which both Theater View and video rendering use. But apparently in Windows 11 they did work on this, and improved it.

In short, on Windows 10 I would really not recommend leaving HDR mode on. On Windows 11, that is another question entirely.

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