The Rules of the Game UHD

[Franchiver]

Greetings,

I'm looking to rip the 4K UHD of the French classic The Rules of the Game, released this year through ESC Editions. However, this 4K presentation has a specific problem I'd like to work around. While the film was prepared for an 4K presentation with SDR in mind, a certain mistake in authoring leads UHD players to erroneously read the disc as HDR, and as a result, black and white tones are rendered the wrong way.

Is there a workaround with MakeMKV to produce a file that would be read as SDR, with colors rendered as they should be?

Any hint would be greatly appreciated!

[alexanderduen]

I understand the frustration with the HDR misinterpretation on the UHD disc. While I'm not an expert, one potential workaround with MakeMKV is to ensure that you select the correct video track during the ripping process. Additionally, you might want to check if there are any settings related to color space in MakeMKV that can be adjusted to ensure it outputs in SDR.
If you’re still having issues, consider using a video editing software after ripping to manually adjust the color settings. Hope this helps!

[dcoke22]

MakeMKV is just going to copy what is on the disc into a .mkv file. It would be interesting to see what MediaInfo shows about the resulting .mkv file.

Here's an example of the video section from a 4K UHD that has HDR10:

Code: Select all

Video
ID                                       : 1
ID in the original source medium         : 4113 (0x1011)
Format                                   : HEVC
Format/Info                              : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile                           : Main 10@L5.1@High
HDR format                               : SMPTE ST 2086, HDR10 compatible
Codec ID                                 : V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC
Duration                                 : 2 h 40 min
Bit rate                                 : 62.8 Mb/s
Width                                    : 3 840 pixels
Height                                   : 2 160 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0 (Type 2)
Bit depth                                : 10 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.316
Stream size                              : 70.2 GiB (93%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No
Color range                              : Limited
Color primaries                          : BT.2020
Transfer characteristics                 : PQ
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.2020 non-constant
Mastering display color primaries        : Display P3
Mastering display luminance              : min: 0.0001 cd/m2, max: 1000 cd/m2
Maximum Content Light Level              : 690 cd/m2
Maximum Frame-Average Light Level        : 74 cd/m2
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray

The 'Color primaries' is listed as BT.2020. This is color space typically used on UHDs and with UHD TV. It is possible for video in a BT.2020 color space to be either SDR or HDR. However, if a part of the playback setup cannot properly process the BT.2020 colorspace (or if it assumes the BT.2020 colorspace is always HDR), the colors can be a little off.

A regular blu-ray uses the BT.709 color space. This is always SDR and pretty much everything can correctly process this colorspace.

Using Handbrake, you can tone map from the BT.2020 colorspace to the BT.709 colorspace. Handbrake does this tone mapping reasonably well. One strategy might be to use Handbrake to create a tone mapped version of the movie and see if that looks better on your setup. The colorspace filter in Handbrake is the mechanism to do this.