Dolby Vision, HDR Playback on Macs

[CoffeeDrinker]

Hey there. So I found out (it may have been the last update?) that the firmware issue with my 4K disc drive was resolved! I am so excited about that. The first 4K disc I tried ripping was Flow, since it is a 4K without HDR. It looked amazing.

But I had some questions. Since I have a Mac OS, the online consensus seemed to be that Infuse was the best for HDR media? (it supports Dolby Vision) (for the record about the monitor, I have a Macbook Pro 16 Inch M3 Pro)

From my tests with HDR movies, it seems like Infuse was able to produce a much more pleasing picture than IINA, my go-to. (I still plan on using it for my SDR files, as Infuse has some limitations, like a more cumbersome interface, and the inability to do frame stepping)

Now, I know that Infuse supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10. But I ran a test using MediaInfo with my 4K rips. It seems like under the video info, they MKVs are described as using HDR10, not Dolby Vision. From what I could tell from another forum post, if a disc supports Dolby Vision, it should automatically be there. I know the disc in question supports Dolby Vision, so I'm not sure what's going on. I was wondering if it was possible that maybe my disc drive doesn't support Dolby Vision?

My disc drive is a Pioneer XD08UMB-S

[niteflyr]

4K UHD discs with DV use Dolby Vision profile 7.0. Makemkv rips these titles to DV profile 7.0. In Mediainfo, the MKV rips should report something like this in the video HDR format line:

"Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 7.6, dvhe.07.06, BL+EL+RPU, no metadata compression, Blu-ray compatible / SMPTE ST 2086, Version HDR10, HDR10 compatible"

Apple does not support DV profile 7.0 They only support profiles 5.0 (streaming titles) and 8.0. iPhone DV videos are shot in 8.0. Infuse will play DV 8.0 titles properly. One must convert these DV 7.0 titles to DV 8.0 in order to play DV in Infuse. There is a MacOS app that will do that. You can get that here:

[url]https://github.com/nekno/DV7toDV8?tab=r ... v-file/url]

Once converted the Mediainfo report video HDR format should look something like this:

"Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 8.1, dvhe.08.06, BL+RPU, no metadata compression, Blu-ray compatible / SMPTE ST 2086, Version HDR10, HDR10 compatible"

All DV titles usually will fall back to HDR10 if incompatible.

[CoffeeDrinker]

4K UHD discs with DV use Dolby Vision profile 7.0. Makemkv rips these titles to DV profile 7.0. In Mediainfo, the MKV rips should report something like this in the video HDR format line:

"Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 7.6, dvhe.07.06, BL+EL+RPU, no metadata compression, Blu-ray compatible / SMPTE ST 2086, Version HDR10, HDR10 compatible"

Apple does not support DV profile 7.0 They only support profiles 5.0 (streaming titles) and 8.0. iPhone DV videos are shot in 8.0. Infuse will play DV 8.0 titles properly. One must convert these DV 7.0 titles to DV 8.0 in order to play DV in Infuse. There is a MacOS app that will do that. You can get that here:

[url]https://github.com/nekno/DV7toDV8?tab=r ... v-file/url]

Once converted the Mediainfo report video HDR format should look something like this:

"Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 8.1, dvhe.08.06, BL+RPU, no metadata compression, Blu-ray compatible / SMPTE ST 2086, Version HDR10, HDR10 compatible"

All DV titles usually will fall back to HDR10 if incompatible.

Okay so I installed the software, and it didn't seem to work. For one thing, the file becomes smaller by about 10GB. But also, with the DV7toDV8 app, I get this:

[CoffeeDrinker]

I'm not getting any information about DV at all when I rip a file. For context, this is what I get for media info with the original MKV Rip:

[CoffeeDrinker]

So update. It turns out that if I hover the mouse over the video information, I get a more detailed report. That is a very counter intuitive user interface. It turns out that using DV7 to DV8 is effective. Would it be possible to get an explanation as to why the file is smaller when I convert to DV8? Also, according to my tests in IINA, a lower bitrate as well.

In terms of detail and richness of colour, Dolby Vision looks very impressive. However, I must lower the brightness on my laptop monitor to about 50%, or just over 50% to get rid of any unwanted blooming on my display. Does anyone have any experience playing HDR videos on Macbooks?