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Tone-mapping in transcoding HDR for playback on SDR screens??


griffindodd
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7 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

if they had the best in Home Cinema they would not need this.  4k should never be transcoded, EVER.  People should honestly have 2 separate libraries and only give access to those users who can direct play 4k content.  That is my PERSONAL informed opinion.  

I couldn't agree more!
(and I have stated this many times)

But still, people want it...

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sooty234
9 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

if they had the best in Home Cinema they would not need this.  4k should never be transcoded, EVER.  People should honestly have 2 separate libraries and only give access to those users who can direct play 4k content.  That is my PERSONAL informed opinion.  

Yes, that would be the ideal. But it isn't anywhere close to reality. There are far too many variables to guarantee that someone won't have a bandwidth fluctuation, or have unsupported audio (because that major blunder has never been fixed), or that all the devices in the chain of use support HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, HLG etc. 

The puritanical ideal that provision should be made to cover all possible playback error scenarios, is idiocy. 

Softworkz, I know you hate the idea of anyone transcoding their media to HEVC to save space, and probably several other similar situations, but only an extreme few have your perception of detail. Most people have no idea what they are looking at, but they will notice something that is outside the norm. This attitude is why Emby is lagging so far behind the likes of Jellyfin and Plex. I have a sizeable storage array, but the growing amount 'HDR' media is immense. To expect every user to maintain a duplicate of every TV episode and movie, both in HDR and SDR is absurd! I fully believe that if Emby doesn't catch up to the others soon, it'll start a backward slide..... actually, the slide has begun. Very few people care that what they're watching is the best they can possibly get. They wouldn't even recognize it if they had it. They are happy just watching the compressed streaming content from the likes of Netflix. They just don't care! This feature has been fought against by Emby from the beginning. And it's because of a terrible attitude. Do your job, and your job is to provide the userbase with what they require, not what you think we should want or have. I work in customer service. If I had that attitude, my customers would be pissed off at me. Emby is a user/customer product, not a pet project. Swallow your damn pride, and do your job!

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7 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

Yes, that would be the ideal. But it isn't anywhere close to reality. There are far too many variables to guarantee that someone won't have a bandwidth fluctuation, or have unsupported audio (because that major blunder has never been fixed), or that all the devices in the chain of use support HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, HLG etc. 

The puritanical ideal that provision should be made to cover all possible playback error scenarios, is idiocy. 

Softworkz, I know you hate the idea of anyone transcoding their media to HEVC to save space, and probably several other similar situations, but only an extreme few have your perception of detail. Most people have no idea what they are looking at, but they will notice something that is outside the norm. This attitude is why Emby is lagging so far behind the likes of Jellyfin and Plex. I have a sizeable storage array, but the growing amount 'HDR' media is immense. To expect every user to maintain a duplicate of every TV episode and movie, both in HDR and SDR is absurd! I fully believe that if Emby doesn't catch up to the others soon, it'll start a backward slide..... actually, the slide has begun. Very few people care that what they're watching is the best they can possibly get. They wouldn't even recognize it if they had it. They are happy just watching the compressed streaming content from the likes of Netflix. They just don't care! This feature has been fought against by Emby from the beginning. And it's because of a terrible attitude. Do your job, and your job is to provide the userbase with what they require, not what you think we should want or have. I work in customer service. If I had that attitude, my customers would be pissed off at me. Emby is a user/customer product, not a pet project. Swallow your damn pride, and do your job!

Your text is disrespectful and really inappropriate given the fact that you already know that the feature is coming shortly.

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sooty234
13 minutes ago, softworkz said:

Your text is disrespectful and really inappropriate given the fact that you already know that the feature is coming shortly.

After years of requesting, and lagging far behind the other platforms. This has been repeatedly pushed back. Remuxed HEVC hasn't even been fixed! Years have passed, and absolutely nothing has been done! 

My text...is 100% appropriate. 

Edited by sooty234
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1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

if they had the best in Home Cinema they would not need this.  4k should never be transcoded, EVER.  People should honestly have 2 separate libraries and only give access to those users who can direct play 4k content.  That is my PERSONAL informed opinion.  

I too feel this way. 4K direct play or bust!  If you can't direct play the 4K it rolls back to a 1080p version or does a remux/transcode from it.  This is how my system is setup at present.

54 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

This attitude is why Emby is lagging so far behind the likes of Jellyfin and Plex. I have a sizeable storage array, but the growing amount 'HDR' media is immense. To expect every user to maintain a duplicate of every TV episode and movie, both in HDR and SDR is absurd! I fully believe that if Emby doesn't catch up to the others soon, it'll start a backward slide..... actually, the slide has begun. Very few people care that what they're watching is the best they can possibly get. They wouldn't even recognize it if they had it. They are happy just watching the compressed streaming content from the likes of Netflix. They just don't care! This feature has been fought against by Emby from the beginning. And it's because of a terrible attitude. Do your job, and your job is to provide the userbase with what they require, not what you think we should want or have. I work in customer service. If I had that attitude, my customers would be pissed off at me. Emby is a user/customer product, not a pet project. Swallow your damn pride, and do your job!

I certainly don't see Emby lagging behind Jellyfin or Plex. They each have a couple of features that Emby doesn't have but the overall experience just can't be compared as Emby is superior for media almost across the board. If you setup your media properly to work with Emby and have your media in decent streaming formats, Emby just works.  Emby has far better clients than JellyFin (no comparison really as a whole) and Plex's clients with their self ingested content are are NO GO for many people as your personal media now is a 2nd rate citizen to their media and ads. <- Is that the kind of progress you want?  Is Emby backsliding by not following this example?

Just look at all the cool new stuff in todays release that is all forward moving and all customer request based. Nearly all changes to the Server in the last 1.5 years is based on user feedback!

Tone mapping has not be fought against, but the underlying tools used like ffmpeg just didn't have the proper foundation previously to do this well enough. This is now changing and Emby is incorporating it.  Even though tone mapping is nice to have and a cool feature it's not actually needed and some people likely after the initial play will go back to dual media (4K & 1080) as this just works, gives better quality and doesn't suck up resources like crazy.

 

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pwhodges
5 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

if they had the best in Home Cinema they would not need this.  4k should never be transcoded, EVER.  People should honestly have 2 separate libraries and only give access to those users who can direct play 4k content.  That is my PERSONAL informed opinion.  

That's ridiculous.  Naturally I like to buy media in the most advanced format I can, even if I can't yet play it without transcoding.  That way I will have a library in due course to justify buying a more advanced TV.  After all, why would I even buy a 4k TV if I didn't have anything already to play on it?

Paul

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vdatanet
5 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

if they had the best in Home Cinema they would not need this.  4k should never be transcoded, EVER.  People should honestly have 2 separate libraries and only give access to those users who can direct play 4k content.  That is my PERSONAL informed opinion.  

All my devices in my LAN can direct play 4K HDR content. My parents can play a 4K HDR movie remotely from time to time ( 1 per month), for me it is not worth duplicating the content for that casual watching (time and storage), I prefer to transcode and tonemap. The truth is that they have never complained about washed out colors, but I want them to watch the media with decent colors.

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will it be possible in the future to transcode a 4k HDR movie to 1080p HDR etc with reduced bitrate ?

 

and why emby dont use the HEVC encoder in latest server version? 99,9999% of devices support HEVC

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pwhodges
2 hours ago, Gee1 said:

and why emby dont use the HEVC encoder in latest server version? 99,9999% of devices support HEVC

My Huawei Mediapad M5, isn't that old.  It supports HEVC main, but not HEVC Main10, of which I have a lot.  I've just bought an iPad Gen8 to replace it (which also means I get to see my ASS subs properly).

Paul

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31 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

My Huawei Mediapad M5, isn't that old.  It supports HEVC main, but not HEVC Main10, of which I have a lot.  I've just bought an iPad Gen8 to replace it (which also means I get to see my ASS subs properly).

Paul

completely on the subject

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3 hours ago, Gee1 said:

will it be possible in the future to transcode a 4k HDR movie to 1080p HDR etc with reduced bitrate ?

For conversion, yes.

3 hours ago, Gee1 said:

and why emby dont use the HEVC encoder in latest server version? 99,9999% of devices support HEVC

Emby is doing "live transcoding" for playback, which is a case of its own. All the advantages that you can read about all over the web ("half bandwidth at same quality" or "double quality at same bandwidth") are about streaming pre-encoded HEVC videos - not about live transcoding. A while ago, I have explained this in some more detail. Maybe somebody can find and post a link to it.

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From personal experience I've found HEVC works really well for live media as well, especially with limited bandwidth.

At low bitrates like 2 or 3 Mb I'd stick with AVC however as HEVC IMHO isn't as good at these low bitrates.

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1 minute ago, cayars said:

From personal experience I've found HEVC works really well for live media as well, especially with limited bandwidth.

I don't mean live streaming, I mean live-encoding.

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CBers

@softworkz How will Emby determine if HDR to SDR is required? 

Will there be an option to disable?

I only ask, as when I play a 4K video via my Shield connected to a 1080 TV, playback is direct and not washed out. 

I believe this is as a result of a recent Shield Experience release. 

Thanks. 

 

 

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1 minute ago, CBers said:

@softworkz How will Emby determine if HDR to SDR is required? 

It will only happens when transcoding 10bit source videos which are HDR.
Transcoding means that the target will be 8bit SDR (H.264)

And transcoding will either happen when the client does not support the video format, or the available (or configured) bandwidth is lower than the source video bandwidth.

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The app determines that when it sends the capabilities. The server just follows directives.

Will the server have a clean way for us to detect all the various dv/hlg/hdr modes so that the applications can build proper capabilities is the question.

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RanmaCanada

For live encoding you would need at least Turing or higher, as that B-Frame support makes all the difference (I do not have personal experience with Quicksync though I know it is freaking awesome after 8th gen with hardware tone mapping included in the upcoming 11th gen).  Hardware h.264 encoding has seriously progressed to the point where it can be unable to tell if it's a hardware encode or a software encode.  HEVC on the other hand it's still pretty easy to tell the difference between the 2.  What I do is keep my libraries separate that way I can control who has access to what.  It is far easier to control manually.  I also have multiple version of the same movie, 4k remux, 4k encode, and then an 1080p version.  Remuxes are for personal viewing in house, 4k encodes are for people who have great internet, and 1080p is for the plebs with garbage tier.  Yes it takes up space, but it's far cheaper in the long run to have multiple copies than to be re-encoding them every single time a user can't direct play.  As for audio issues, I ensure a compatible audio track is included with every single encode that I have created.  From a purist standpoint, Tone mapping is garbage and should never be done as you will never match studio SDR grading.  It's only an extremely vocal and disrespectful minority that are demanding tone mapping.

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1 minute ago, speechles said:

Will the server have a clean way for us to detect all the various dv/hlg/hdr modes so that the applications can build proper capabilities is the question.

Not yet. You're right, we'll have to refine this a bit.

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CBers
3 minutes ago, softworkz said:

It will only happens when transcoding 10bit source videos which are HDR.
Transcoding means that the target will be 8bit SDR (H.264)

And transcoding will either happen when the client does not support the video format, or the available (or configured) bandwidth is lower than the source video bandwidth.

Sorry, that didn't answer my question. 

I'll wait for it to arrive then report back. 

Thanks. 

 

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2 minutes ago, CBers said:

Sorry, that didn't answer my question. 

Did you rather mean this:

21 hours ago, softworkz said:

In the main UI we will have on/off for hw tone mapping and separate on/off for cpu tone mapping.

Algorithm selection and parameter selection will be possible via Diagnostics plugin (but no saving across restarts).

That's how it will be in the initial beta, then we will see where to go from there.

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vdatanet
2 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

should never be done as you will never match studio SDR grading

But it's better than washed out colors

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crusher11

There are plenty of 4K-only releases and I'd rather have a tone mapped transcode than have to buy a whole new copy TBH. 

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I think we're talking just about two different things:

The one side is about the best strategy for building and curating a media library.
My personal view for that is: when you don't have a HDR display for the primary viewing setup, then it's stupid, to acquire HDR content and rely on your media server's tone mapping. That's just inferior to acquiring original SDR content instead.

But the other side: When you only have an HDR version of a video (for whatever reason) and want to play that on an SDR display, then a media server should of course be able to do the tone mapping to play that video in the best possible way.

And that's what we will deliver. It is one of the oldest items on my list, but in the past, it just wasn't possible to do this with acceptable performance.

Edited by softworkz
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RanmaCanada
21 minutes ago, softworkz said:

I think we're talking just about two different things:

The one side is about the best strategy for building and curating a media library.
My personal view for that is: when you don't have a HDR display for the primary viewing setup, then it's stupid, to acquire HDR content and rely on your media server's tone mapping. That's just inferior to acquiring original SDR content instead.

But the other side: When you only have an HDR version of a video (for whatever reason) and want to play that on an SDR display, then a media server should of course be able to do the tone mapping to play that video in the best possible way.

And that's what we will deliver. It is one of the oldest items on my list, but in the past, it just wasn't possible to do this with acceptable performance.

I'll play devil's advocate here and say how about Emby devs limit it only to people with Intel 11th gen?  As it will be baked into the hardware, there will be less possibility for users to screw it up by not having the proper hardware to do it and then flooding the sub with complaints that their tone mapping is off, because we know users will do that as they attempt to run Emby on potato systems.   If you want to play the game, make sure you're using the right equipment.

 

edit: And I will add from reading the Plex and Jellyfin forums, there are far too many users who are moaning and complaining that their hardware can't tonemap properly and doing it is bringing their systems to their knees.  Or they are missing dependencies and running with improper drivers.  All the more reason for the dev team to limit it to Intel 11th gen only.

Edited by RanmaCanada
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