I usually have the vero4k+ connected to the hdmi in on an oppo 203 to take advantage of the oppo tone mapping. The oppo is connected to a denon receiver which feeds my projector a JVC RS500. This setup has always caused me issues though as the vero won’t play nicely with the oppo in terms of adjusting the display rate for 4k movies. Regular blu-rays are fine. It usually takes me multiple tries to get a 4k movie going. Once it does the picture quality is fantastic but its very frustrating. I thought turning off adjusting the display rate on the vero fixed my issues but it didn’t. While the 4k movie would play immediately it was 8 bit as opposed to 10 or 12 for a 4k movie. I have tried every combo of settings on the oppo and nothing works consistently. Another reason to use the oppo is the ability to adjust the picture from 16:9 to 21:9 without having to adjust the projector lens.
So now that you have my setup, I decided to test the new BT.2020 SDR functionality bypassing the oppo. The good news is the 4k movies play first try. The bad news is I don’t think its feeding the projector the correct info. Here are two screenshots of what the projector is reporting. The first one is with the vero connected to the oppo with the oppo set to HDR off BT2020. Notice it says Deep Color 12 bit but no HDR. The second pic is the vero connected directly to the recevier with the HDR processing set to BT.2020 SDR. Notice Deep Color is blank/greyed out and there is an HDR line that says yes. Is this the expected behavior?
Finally I’m happy to help test the functionality on the Vero for my projector setup. Ideally though I would like to use the oppo. Primarily because of the ability to switch from 16:9 to 21:9 instantly leaving the projector lens alone and because the tone mapping is fantastic. So I have two logs. This log is with the vero connected directly to the receiver so you can check why the projector thinks its still HDR https://paste.osmc.tv/veviliwaba
This log is with the vero connected to the oppo. https://paste.osmc.tv/ifocihejod. It took 3 tries for the movie to display. The first two times I got a blue screen from the projector. Interestingly I can press stop on the remote and it brings me back to kodi. On the third try it played. When I stopped the movie I got a blue screen instead of going back to kodi. Can you see that in the log? Hopefully there is some kind of fix for this. It’s driving me nuts lol. I hope I have provided enough info. Thanks!
Found a bug and fixed it. Oddly, my Vertex was reporting ‘SDR’ which it doesn’t when passing BT709 signals.
Yes. Your projector has a maximum tmds clock of 300MHz. We therefore have to use YUV 4:2:2 to send 10 bits, which technically is not ‘deep color’.
YUV 4:2:2 is the same format whether the signal is 8, 10 or 12 bits so whatever is reporting this has no way to know the original bit-depth.
There’s nothing in the logs suggesting anything is amiss. AFAICT Vero is sending the right signals to the Oppo at every stage.
You could try setting the output of Vero to 4:2:2. That may make the signal more digestible to the Oppo.
Observation: it seems the Oppo does not advertise HDR capability on it’s HDMI input. Is this expected? What it means is Vero is doing it’s own HDR-SDR conversion and the Oppo must be just tweaking that, rather than doing the full conversion from HDR (ST2084) to SDR (BT709) which might be sub-optimal.
Thanks for replying! Isn’t 4:2:2 worse than 4:4:4? It’s sending half the colors where as 4:4:4 is untouched? The oppo reports getting 10bits from the vero and then the oppo outputs 4:4:4 and feeds the projector deep color at 12 bits when set to auto for the hdr settings. I can force 10 bits from the oppo if you think that makes a difference. The vero when connected directly to the receiver isn’t reporting this to the projector. Will it with the bug fix you mentioned. I’m just trying to understand the difference. It seems the oppo is the better route but I’m not sure I fully understand.
I’m not sure why the oppo isn’t advertising hdr. All the settings are set to output hdr. It’s very frustrating that it only occasionally works with the vero. I’ve tried replacing cables. I’ve also tried going directly from oppo to the projector and a separate cable from oppo to the receiver for audio. Nothing seems to fix the issue.
OK, I’m trying to understand the capabilities of your three devices.
The JVC is said in the specs to be ‘HDR compatible’. I don’t have the stamina to go through the pages of stuff on the AV forums but the impression I’m getting is that it doesn’t officially support HDR10. Having said that, I have an EDID from someone’s log for an RS500 that does indicate BT2020 and ST2084 support which are all that’s needed for HDR10. So I’m wondering why you need to consider BT2020-SDR at all. Then again, your screenshot shows a perfectly respectable picture when Vero is sending SDR (but wrongly signalling HDR as I’ve admitted). That suggests the JVC is ignoring the signal.
You don’t say which Denon you have so I don’t know if that supports HDR10 (I assume it does) or has any video processing that might be getting in the way.
Then there’s the Oppo. I’m going to assume HDR off (BT2020) means it expects a BT2020-SDR input and outputs BT2020-SDR, ie it’s not doing a ST 2084 - BT 709 EOTF conversion. If so then it’s correctly indicating no ST 2084 support. But then you say ‘set to auto for the HDR settings’ so I’m a bit confused.
Can you confirm the settings/capabilities on each device?
Edit: Just realised we’ve been round that tree on 25 April in the testing thread.
So, you’re trying to send BT.2020 SDR to the projector, is that right? Not HDR?
Should we perhaps check a few settings on the Oppo, just to make absolutely sure there’s nothing funky going on there…?
Under “Video Output Setup”, what values do you have for HDR Setting (all four values), Output Resolution, Color Space, and Color Depth? Also, are you using HDMI IN, or HDMI IN BYPASS? And under Device Setup, what do you have for HDMI IN Specs?
Under most circumstances it makes no difference. The original video file will be 4:2:0 (meaning every pixel has brightness data, but only 25% of pixels have colour information). Somewhere along the line, between decoding the video and actually displaying it on the screen, you have to generate colour information for the other 75% of the pixels, which is done by interpolating between the pixels that you do have colour data for. (This is called “chroma upsampling”). If you output 4:4:4 that means the player has done all of the colour interpolation for all of the missing 75% by itself; if you output 4:2:2 then the player has figured out the colour of 25% of the pixels, and either the Oppo or the projector will interpolate colour data for the other 50%. Most devices use much the same algorithm for the interpolation process, meaning the end result will be the same no matter what device does it. (There are a few exceptions; the 2015 and 2017 Nvidia Shield TV models are incredibly bad at it; UHD Panasonic blu ray players are unusually good; but otherwise it rarely makes a difference).
That usually means it’s capable of accepting an HDR input, but not capable of actually displaying HDR. So it can take an HDR video stream, do its own HDR->SDR tone-mapping, and display the result.
I’m pretty sure it means that it takes an HDR2020 input, and outputs tone-mapped SDR2020. @gkron92 presumably feels that allowing the Oppo to do the HDR->SDR conversion, while retaining the BT.2020 colour gamut, produces better results than the projector’s built-in tone-mapping.
Although it would be good to have independent confirmation of all that!
Assuming that’s correct, he needs to be feeding HDR2020 to the Oppo rather than having the Vero convert to SDR.
@gkron92 provides the background in the 4.9 testing thread. It seems, if you send HDR10 to the JVC it locks its tonemapping (gamma D they call it). I think other users send SDR to their JVCs so that they can use its user-adjustable tonemaps.
Meanwhile, I suspect the Oppo’s tonemapping is just HDR-SDR with no adjustments.
@grahamh and @angry.sardine Ugh. I am such a fool. Thank you for your responses it really helped me. I hadn’t updated the Oppo to the last firmware because I had read there were issues with it when they released it. That was a poor decision on my end. I upgraded and of course it fixed my refresh rate issues. I tested both HDMI IN and the HDMI IN BYPASS. I need to use the HDMI IN as it allows me to use the zoom feature to easily switch from 16:9 to 21:9. Bypass does not allow it. I did notice that when using HDMI IN a 4k movie does not trigger the HDR flag on the oppo while HDMI IN BYPASS does.
The bug that I reported is legit though. The projector does and can display an HDR signal but when it recevies an HDR signal it normally forces and locks in gamma D resulting in a dark picture. The bug is forcing gamma D, however it does allow me to change it which usually it doesn’t. Every time I select a movie it will force gamma D. It sounds like @grahamh has fixed this already which is great!
When using HDMI IN on the oppo this is what I see from the Oppo info. The vero is outputting 4:4:4 10 bit and the oppo takes it and outputs 4:2:2 12bit. I’m not sure how I got 4:4:4: 12 bit before upgrading the firmware but it sounds like it doesn’t matter.
The options I selected on the Oppo are as follows:
HDR - Off (BT.2020)
Target Luminance - 300 nits
HDR to SDR Mode: Mode 3
Dolby Vision Processing - Auto
Output Resolution - Auto
Color Space - Auto
Color Depth - Auto
Do you have a suggestion as to what settings I should use on the projector? I 'm using BT.2020 and 2.4 gamma
It has three different tone-mapping approaches to choose from. That’s the “HDR to SDR Mode” parameter. And the “Target Luminance” affects the result too.
Okay, that’s what you want. With the latest firmware and using HDMI IN (not bypass) this should present itself to the Vero as an 18GHz display, which will allow the Vero to send 4:4:4 10-bit 2160p HDR to it.
I suggest setting Color Space to “Auto/Safe” if there’s any kind of connection stability issue.
I’d also recommend connecting the Denon to the Oppo’s second HDMI output - that’s one less device in the chain that can cause problems.
You may want to set the output resolution to either 1080p auto, or UHD auto - whichever is the native resolution of the projector. (That’s especially true if you have the Denon between the Oppo and the projector).
(I’m guessing that the Oppo’s upscaling is better than that of the projector; but if you think it isn’t then set output resolution to Source Direct instead).
If you can’t get the Vero talking to the Oppo reliably then, as Graham suggested, try forcing 4:2:2 colour subsampling on the Vero - but hopefully it should work without that.
With any luck, that plus the new firmware should get everything working the way you want!
Can’t really help with that, sorry. You could ask for advice on Avforums; or if you have £300 to spare, you should seriously consider getting a professional calibrator in - I always do that with a new TV.
Thanks again. It’s already worlds better. Appreciate all of the feedback and knowledge. @grahamh When do you think your fix will be available to test? I still have the testing branch installed.
Glad you sorted it. The fix will be in the next OSMC update, but I don’t know how soon that will be. There are a few other things being worked on from users’ feedback so I expect an update within days.
You could ask for advice on Avforums; or if you have £300 to spare, you should seriously consider getting a professional calibrator in - I always do that with a new TV.