PGS subtitles appearing dark grey in HDR

Are you able to play your Godfather UHD rip through the Panny via USB? If you get grey subs, that might point the finger at MakeMKV rather than Kodi.

This is a nice idea, but Panny support for mkv files is very limited, neither my TV nor my UB420 can render PGS subs from mkv, nor can my Sony X700. However, my brother is fortunate to own an Oppo 203, and its mkv support is probably best in class. When he has had chance to test Iā€™ll report back.

If it helps at all, Iā€™m able to reproduce this issue: my Oppo 203 plays the subtitles as gold, while my Vero 4K+ tends to render them as grey. A good example is at about 1:37:15, on the line ā€œI kiss your hand, Don Tommasino.ā€

Playing it on my Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, the subtitles also come out grey; so I would tentatively conclude that itā€™s a Kodi issue rather than an OSMC one.

When playing from a file, you mean? If so that is indeed useful (takes the pressure off MakeMKV). Iā€™m also intrigued you imply the subtitle colours are changing, such that there are better and worse places to see the effect. AFAIK Vero and Kodi donā€™t do any dynamic tone adjustment so that seems to be your display adjusting things. Is that ā€˜good exampleā€™ especially dark/light perhaps? (I donā€™t have any Godfathers).

Yes, all devices playing from the same MKV file.

I donā€™t claim to be an expert on tone-mapping, but I would have expected any such adjustment only to affect the brightness of the image. In this case itā€™s not just the brightness of the subtitles that is different, thereā€™s a change in their colour - from yellow/gold on the Oppo to monochrome grey in Kodi.

The camera exposure settings and white balance in these two photos wonā€™t be the same, but even so the effect is quite visibleā€¦

Oppo:

Vero 4K+:

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Indeed, thatā€™s the puzzling bit.

The original Godfather disk is Dolby Vision. MakeMKV is quite likely preserving the DV layer in the MKV file - it can do that. But my Oppo 203 isnā€™t capable of playing back an MKV file in DV, it just treats it as a single layer HDR10 file, and outputs HDR 10, same as my other two devices. (If I were to remux to .TS it could play that as DV, but I wanted to make sure all devices were treating the file the same way, so Iā€™m using MKV for now).

I must apologise here: I should have watched a bit more of the film before posting! Having now watched a bit more, I am not seeing variations at different points in the film; the subtitles seem to be grey throughout (including in the scene where Luca Brassi visits the Tattaglias). Iā€™m not sure why my experience seems to differ from @Turisu1 .

I checked with one of my other test clips - a little bit from a 4K remaster of Avatar that Iā€™ve sent you guys before - and that is playing correctly on the Vero 4K+ with gold/yellow subtitles, so it can manage it sometimes! But on The Godfather itā€™s as if itā€™s treating the subtitles as a monochrome image.

Iā€™m not seeing any appreciable differences between devices in the colour grading of the movie itself. I wouldnā€™t want to swear theyā€™re absolutely identical, but theyā€™re certainly not grossly different. The only visible difference is in the subtitle rendering.

Thanks again. You guys are lucky I enjoy a puzzle more than I care what colours subtitles are.

I thought the Avatar subtitles were burned in rather than PGS? No they are PGS.

thanks @angry.sardine for your tests on this, seems to be pointing to a Kodi bug?

Well, the same thing is happening on my Vero 4K+ under Linux, and on my Fire TV Stick 4K Max under Android - so that certainly hints at a Kodi-level problem.