Nope, no BDMV Playback (last checked January as it basically is the Oppo with altered software and some hardware changes), so your are out of luck unless there has been a firmware that out of the sudden is piracy friendly. As said, any UHD BD DV Player could play dual layer streams, it is just they simply do not play them from anything else than a physical disc encrypted disc. The SoCs and DV chips are pretty much the same everywhere, they have the hardware but the software does not allow you to leverage it. Sure maybe some modified Firmwares might show up. Possible there are other players that can play rips, but never heard so far of any. Time will tell, sooner or later some players will surface - but still the same problem: you have to play it over a player not your mediacenter box.
HLG? Well it is fact that is just two fixed non linear gamma curves that take the stream as broadcasted and output SDR and HDR on HLG enabled TVs. And TVs that do not support HLG will just take the altered base stream. Read up on it. It is the worst of all possible options, though this approach will work for sports where color and proper lighting are of no real consequence anyway and with some talking heads it will also be no issue. Anything else, it fails when it comes to quality and what a higher dynamic range is about. Read up how it works, what it does for yourself. If you like it, good for you.
Thanks for the explanation on DV. OK, HLG doesnât have the smarts of DV or even HDR10+ but what makes you say it will look crappy on SDR TVs? If an HDR-capable player knows it is feeding a SDR display, why canât it produce a picture to BT709 similar in quality to one produced in the studio and issued on DVD (say). Or is DVD your definition of crappy?
Itâs not like you have an proper Rec.709 signal and it magically becomes HDR if you have a TV that supports it. What happening in reality is: you take HDR content and squash it down with a simple gamma curve and you have a signal in size of SDR content without any additional meta data that looks kinda SDRish, but not quite right (that the HLG content). And that signal gets broadcasted. It is not a normal SDR signal that gets out and magical becomes HDR.
If your TV supports HLG well than it applies a gamma curve and makes things in the brighter part of the picture brighter by applying a curve again and the previous squashed down signal gets expanded again. Really it is just a gamma curve, nothing else - though to be fair it gets a bit adjusted in regards to the capabilities of the TV displaying the signal. Naturally most HDR data was lost when the signal was initially compressed.
Now if you watch a HLG stream on a TV that does does not support HLG, you only see the stream without any gamma curve applied. HLG does not have any kind of backwards compatiblity for Rec.709. Old TVs can just display the squashed down signal as it is and it looks SDR-ish but not quite right like the same content would normally look. Though HLG can be flagged in an MPEG2 Transport Stream, so on HLG enable TVs normal SDR would look like normal SDR with no gamma curve applied - would look atrocious if it applied it all streamsâŚ
It is a big compromise both for HDR as well as for SDR. Yes, there is content where HLG works very fine (e.g. sports, talking head shows, and to some extend documentaries or nature shows ). But on an non HLG TV it looks subpar and itâs clearly visible right away. Unless for people using âdynamic modeâ on their TV and never saw proper colors in the first place, they wonât notice anyway.
As said, it will probably only be used for sports, talking head stuff and some nature shows in the end. They know the limitations of this fake HDR and are openly with it. Itâs a low cost solution to have something like HDR for broadcasters. On the Internet people with no technological understanding hype it like there would be HDR, HDR10+, DV and HLG. And one is better then the other.
In reality it looks like this on the HDR side: HLG < HDR10 < HDR10+ < Dolby Vision. Yeah, itâs that simple. And for SDR TVs a proper SDR signal always looks better than showing the HLG signal. You can try it at home for yourself, create some HLG content from HDR stuff and youâll see.
I think you are missing my point. If content has been mastered with BT2020 and a fixed EOTF, (static metadata) the studio can then squash it further to BT709 and SDR gamma and publish it as SDR (say DVD). If it publishes it as HLG, that is a superset of the SDR content so containing all the information necessary to make a âproperâ SDR signal. OK, we wonât have the algo the studio used to squash BT2020 to BT709 but if we did thereâs no reason why we canât get identical results to the studioâs DVD version.
Donât get me wrong, thatâs not happening at the moment: typically HDR played on my SDR screens is dark and over-saturated. But I live in hope we can improve on that.
And this is not really the forum to discuss the relative merits of HLG, HDR10/+ and DV. All OSMC can do is make the best job it can of rendering each on the millions of different displays out there.
Even if the chip could do it, the software part needed would never be open source and therefore not usable or accessible for OSMC.