Best 4K Clients

[heciruam 30]

Hello,

So I'm trying to get playback from full 4K Bluray hdr rips without trasncoding and subtitles on.

My main client is an HTPC with Emby Theater which plays everything obviously. I'm trying to upgrade a few older TVs in the house with new clients.
The main ones are ShieldTV, Raspberry Pi with Theater linux image and the mi devices. The problem for me is finding the information for the following two scenarios:

 

1. Does it play full 4K rips with HDR with subtitles
2. Can it do Tonemapping for non-hdr screens?
    

So which clients can do number "1." and which ones can do both?

Thanks in advance

[sooty234 266]

Shield can't tone map. The Mi Box I used to have, would tone map, doesn't have great audio support but you could just enable downmixing locally and it should direct play all audio. The subs are something that you could also get stuck with. Luke's new build of Exoplayer has greater support than the original Exoplayer, but that is about to be upgraded. The RasPi is using the same player as Theater on Windows, so that should tone map very well and also should have the same ability to play the subs.

[vdatanet 1617]

10 hours ago, sooty234 said:

Shield can't tone map

Shield Experience Upgrade 8.2 (Relea | NVIDIA GeForce Forums

Quote

Display:

Adds ability for Kodi to adjust display resolution for 480p content

Adds HDR to SDR color tone mapping

I have a Shield connected to a SDR display and tone mapping is great.

[Q-Droid 989]

MiBox with Android 9 is not so good. Probably best to stay away from those for the time being. 

 

[ebr 16169]

42 minutes ago, Q-Droid said:

MiBox with Android 9 is not so good. Probably best to stay away from those for the time being. 

 

Hi.  Based on what?

[Q-Droid 989]

5 minutes ago, ebr said:

Hi.  Based on what?

MiBox on Oreo (8) was fine but the update to Pie (9) and Pie boxes that received updates have bugs and changes. I think there were changes to HD audio support but that's not something I use so don't have details. The big one for me is that the update broke MPEG2 playback and hasn't been fixed yet. So many OTA TV channels can't play correctly. Same issue as the old thread. 

Not everyone cares about mpeg2 but should know going in. 

 

[sooty234 266]

2 hours ago, vdatanet said:

Shield Experience Upgrade 8.2 (Relea | NVIDIA GeForce Forums

I have a Shield connected to a SDR display and tone mapping is great.

Well that's cool. I'll have to dig out an SDR TV and see what it's like.

[heciruam 30]

2 hours ago, vdatanet said:

Shield Experience Upgrade 8.2 (Relea | NVIDIA GeForce Forums

I have a Shield connected to a SDR display and tone mapping is great.

Thanks for the info, thats good to know.

[vdatanet 1617]

15 hours ago, sooty234 said:

Well that's cool. I'll have to dig out an SDR TV and see what it's like.

You seem to be an expert in HDR, SDR and tone-mapping and you seem to have good equipment. For me Nvidia Shield tone-mapping is good, but I would like to know your opinion. There is no rush, take your time. Thank you!

[sooty234 266]

On 12/5/2020 at 1:34 AM, vdatanet said:

You seem to be an expert in HDR, SDR and tone-mapping and you seem to have good equipment. For me Nvidia Shield tone-mapping is good, but I would like to know your opinion. There is no rush, take your time. Thank you!

I dug out an SDR TV and hooked it up to make some comparisons. I had to use Luke's ATV app for this, as the ebr's beta wouldn't play anything without remuxing the file, which I then get the green blocks. Anyway, I compared the SDR version of a movie to the same movie in HDR with the Shield tone mapping. The color mapping is very good, but they do make it a little brighter. I can definitely tell the difference between the unaltered HDR and the SDR. But, what the industry wants from tone mapping is to recreate the SDR mastering, which it appears to achieve quite well. I'm sure if I took stills of the studio SDR and the tone mapped SDR I would likely find more differences, but only people like me would ever do something like that. For the average user, they won't know the difference. They also won't be getting anything like HDR, sooooo......

Edited December 6, 2020 by sooty234

[heciruam 30]

Which shield did you try it on? Will it work on all or just the latest 2019 model?

[vdatanet 1617]

1 minute ago, heciruam said:

Which shield did you try it on? Will it work on all or just the latest 2019 model?

I was using a Shield 2017, as far as I know tone mapping support was added to all models.

[sooty234 266]

I have a 2017, also.

[Carlo 4560]

For me the main difference and reason to get the Shield TV 2019 over other devices isn't so much the picture (which is good) but for the SOUND possibilities.  Short of an HTTP nothing can touch the flexibility of the Shield TV.