I Have Published a HDR10 to HLG Converter

[wswartzendruber]

I was thinking about something several days ago and had a realization. With SDR, indoor and outdoor scenes tend to have small variance in where reference white would be. But with HDR, there is a lot more variance between these scenes. With the BBC putting reference white at 75% HLG, and then by viewing this on a SDR display, we effectively have these dimmer indoor scenes "pushed up" towards 75% and the brighter outdoor scenes "pushed down" towards the same level. This seems to go a long way in making HLG look "like it should" despite the greater variance in HDR's levels of indoor vs. outdoor scenes.

As best I can tell, the 75% HLG level for reference white was a BBC innovation, as NHK's original specification called for 50%. Another way to put this is that the NHK seems to have viewed HLG as a hack to have basic monitoring work on existing 10-bit equipment while the BBC wanted HLG to "just work" on existing 10-bit consumer devices.

[wswartzendruber]

I've got Planet Earth II showing up on 4K Blu-ray today.

For those who don't know, this is what was used to show the world HLG for the first time in 2017 using the BBC's iPlayer app.

As I understand it, the content was natively graded in HLG and then for this disc, converted directly to PQ. So hopefully, reference white is parked neatly at 203 nits and MaxCLL is right at 1,000 nits.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by wswartzendruber

I've got Planet Earth II showing up on 4K Blu-ray today.

uuuuuh David Attenborough, a national legend!
I love the BBC documentaries in HLG, they're always perfect and his voice is so calm.

Originally Posted by wswartzendruber

For those who don't know, this is what was used to show the world HLG for the first time in 2017 using the BBC's iPlayer app.

Yep, the only things I still don't like about the BBC iPlayer are:

A) No 5.1 support
B) No HLG support on the web version

The first one is a bit sad 'cause lots of programs are actually made in 5.1 and yet they're just sent out as stereo (as a long-time subwoofer owner, I care about this).
The second is really sad 'cause you can see the glorious UHD HLG contents if and only if you're using the BBC iPlayer App AND your Smart TV is supported. On one side, I understand that this means that they rigorously test each and every device the app works on (and I'm not joking here, when I met Andrew, one of the guys from the BBC, he said that they absolutely positively test them all to make sure they perform correctly), but on the other side it's a bit sad 'cause it means that whenever it comes to generic things they can't test like the web version they limit the features to the very bare minimum set of what they know is gonna work...