External player best practices - resume content and marking position?

[cwills75 13]

On 9/3/2022 at 11:15 AM, Luke said:

What would it take to get you back on to using the internal player?

I do think some of the latest builds of the latest mpv player (not the one in Emby currently) are doing a better job with HDR->SDR tonemapping in regards to color, so updating Emby to that would be an improvement with that.  A large portion of using madVR with beamer users is being able to set your display's target nit level for the DTM, so that is a big feature missing when using anything other than madVR.  High-end home theater enthusiasts are typically either using a HTPC with madVR right now, or opening their wallet further and adding a commercial Lumagen Radiance or madVR Envy system in-line with an Nvidia Shield Pro and/or UHD disc player for DTM.

If I could wave a magic wand for a perfect feature set on a device, it would be if Emby could add DTM by being able to stretch the HDR EOTF with proper colors in the high nit highlights with users being able to input their display's max nit level directly in the app on an Nvidia Shield Pro.  I don't know if a Shield Pro is fast enough to directly handle this, and it would require a new feature set from the Emby team.  The next best option would be if the Shield isn't fast enough, for Emby Theater to allow for this, and the third option would be to allow Emby Theater to allow madVR internally without an external player somehow so the OSD controls work when playing media.

[cwills75 13]

On 9/3/2022 at 11:53 PM, Dizzy49 said:

I'm jealous of your monitor   My work laptop actually has a DV screen, I wish I could use it but it's too small to usually regularly.  I'd love an OLED monitor, but they are stupid expensive.  I can get a 65" OLED TV for the price of a 32" OLED Monitor (eyeroll).  My 3x 27" monitors already take up quite a bit of space, so I'm not sure I could handle a bunch of 32" monitors.

I've debated trying to get an inexpensive 35-42" OLED TV and try to use it as a monitor.  It's been a LONG time since I've used a TV has a computer screen, and the results weren't great.  I need readable text for my job

My 55" LG CX OLED is a TV screen that I'm using for a PC monitor.  It's not so much of a big deal now, but when I was in the market and bought this one, there weren't that many options available for a display that could do 4K/120Hz with G-Sync and VRR with a single cable connection from a GPU.  That said, as a PC monitor, it's perfectly fine with text legibility.
 

On 9/3/2022 at 11:53 PM, Dizzy49 said:

I don't have a video card installed in the server, it uses whatever is on the i7-7700K.  I am using the same settings you have.  I'll do some testing to see what it's actually doing, I installed the Diagnostics plugin that will give me better info on what's going on.  I know the last HDR movie we tried to watch was unwatchable on our "big tv" that is just 1080p SDR.

I had a chuckle at your 3060 vs 3080 comparison.  I only have a 2080 in my desktop that I use for gaming, lol.  I'm not ready to drop $400+ on a video card just for transcoding right now.  Maybe if I can see some real difference, or more importantly, my WIFE can see a difference.  She was PISSED at how dark the last GoT was, you couldn't make out a single thing in that big fight scene.

Even without a GPU, your 7700K will be perfectly fine for transcoding when needed, it will just be more stream limited, but if you don't need that many streams being transcoded at once, it's not big deal.  THAT episode of GoT is horrendous.  When it came out on streaming, there were so many complaints about it, kinda like The Batman (2022) in a lot of movie theaters.  The stream HBO was outputting at the time was so dark/compressed, even trying to brighten it up with display settings just started to show black crush and massive banding without any real detail improvement, although a little brighter.  The UHD disc copies and the new DV stream on HBO now is massively better, but even with that, with my projector's default settings not using madVR, it is almost unwatchable, even in a completely black room.  Running it through madVR with the DTM brightens it up more/better than any settings on my projector.  A new GPU isn't going to fix that, but if you were to play that episode ran through madVR, then output that at 1080p SDR on your current TV, it should help a lot, but you'll need madVR to do the HDR->SDR instead of Emby.

On 9/3/2022 at 11:53 PM, Dizzy49 said:

We want to replace our TV with a 4k HDR, but we have a 98" TV, and dropping down to a 70 or even 85" is a hard pill to swallow.  I was just at Walmart and they had an 85" Hisense 4k DV for $725.  I could probably swing that.  $5k for a Samsung 85" QuantumDot, not so much.  I THINK even a "budget" TV like the Hisense would be a decent upgrade in picture quality over what we have now that we MIGHT be ok with losing a bit of size.

That's a tough call.  4K resolution itself is often a complete waste unless you are sitting within the distance necessary to be able to see the pixel difference, and oftentimes people aren't.  There is a more noticeable increase in quality going to HDR from SDR, but that isn't even so much the display as it is the media.  The larger bit depth, color space and bitrate allow for cleaner content without compression artifacts or banding.

[Dizzy49 94]

On 9/6/2022 at 8:00 AM, cwills75 said:

That's a tough call.  4K resolution itself is often a complete waste unless you are sitting within the distance necessary to be able to see the pixel difference, and oftentimes people aren't.  There is a more noticeable increase in quality going to HDR from SDR, but that isn't even so much the display as it is the media.  The larger bit depth, color space and bitrate allow for cleaner content without compression artifacts or banding.

Our first row is 6.5' back, and the second is 10.5' or 11' back.  Last night we watched the 3rd episode of House of the Dragon.  It was so bad, you couldn't tell what was going on for almost half the episode.  About an hour ago I hooked up 3 diff PCs to my monitors.  Middle had it running Emby and transcoding to 1080p SDR.  Right had MadVR outputting 4k to my HDR screen.  Left had MadVR outtputting 4k HDR->SDR.  I turned all the lights off in my office, and had my wife come check.  I had them synced up really well so you could really see the difference between them.  She agreed that the madVR HDR->SDR was much better than Emby to 1080p, and at first she wasn't sure about the HDR, but after about 5 minutes she really liked it.  There were a few things in the first 5min of the episode that we had no idea happened because it was so dark.  I got a "Hmmm, HDR really does make a difference, I think you were making it up."
So I'm taking that as a green light to buy the biggest 8K screen with HDR/DV that I can find!  

I really want an OLED monitor, but they are stupid expensive!  $3k-5k for 27-34" ?!?!?!  I can get that Samsung Quantum Dot for that kind of money! Makes the $1300 Alienware look almost reasonable.  My monitor stand can only handle up to 32", so I'm limited there, and if I went to a 4-" inch, I'd probably have to use a single monitor.  Ugh.  First replace the theater TV, then maybe they will have some good 27-32" OLED choices that aren't nose bleed expensive.