Hello Nuccers,
I had a Skull Canyon and ran into issues with the Intel GPU not supporting playing back Bluray 3D content (iso files) and that it also never supported HDR. When I heard about Hades Canyon, I thought, "Fantastic! An Intel NUC with a decent GPU which should be able to deal with HDR etc.,".
I got the unit last Friday, installed everything easily and then set about trying to get it to playback HDR content. A few details about where I am currently:
1. The unit is connected to my TV an LG OLED55E6V (2016) using one of the HDMI ports on the back of the unit.
2. The OS is Windows 10 Pro, fully activated, fully updated.
3. In Windows 10, in the display settings I have HDR toggled on (HDR & WCG).
4. Upon enabling this I have a washed image on the TV screen. The TV correctly reports a HDR flag, but all the colours look washed out.
5. Looking in the Radeon driver settings, I noted that using the colour mapping BT2020 has washed out colours, but swapping to BT709 leads to colours on the desktop which I consider normal. I have been informed the BT2020 is the correct colour setting for HDR...... (in any case the driver does not save the setting and everytime you reboot it defaults to BT2020.)
6. In the Radeon driver settings, suspiciously under colour depth, I only had 8 bit enabled and available. The screen was being driven at 60Hz and I remember reading somewhere in the past that my LG screen from 2016 can only support 10/12bit colour depth at 30Hz and below, so have currently set the refresh rate manually to 24Hz and now have 10 bit colour enabled. Still looks washed out......
7. So Windows 10 is telling me that HDR is enabled and the TV also shows me the HDR flag correctly.
8. In terms of trying to play back content, I initially used MPV, but after some testing realised it only supports SDR content, after investigating more it would appear there are some options which might work:
a. Cyberlink PowerDVD 18 Ultra - I upgraded a license I previously had, but it stubbornly refuses to playback HDR content, it would appear from checking other forums that HDR support is limited to Nvidia cards and (irony alarm) Intel GPUs. It plays back SDR content.
b. Microsoft films and TV - In my case it just produces a black screen......
c. MadVR + MPC - I have not tried this, this setup is far too fiddly and involves changing registration settings to get from the right settings for SDR to HDR and back again depending on what content you want to playback.
d. VLC 3.0+ - Tried this and it just seemed to playback content in SDR.
So I cannot get the unit at this time to playback HDR 4K HEVC 10 bit content. This is not the end of the world for me, I currently use an AppleTV with Infuse and that is producing amazing looking content, but I have always had a Windows HTPC and hoped to be able to continue that trend.
Any ideas? Am I trying to do something that the unit should be able to or not be able to do? Am I jumping the gun and need to wait for the Vega drivers to mature a bit? Or for AMD 4K support to properly come online? I read the following:
AMD's PlayReady 3.0 In Polaris, Vega GPUs, APUs to Enable 4K HDR Streaming on PC | TechPowerUp
Thanks for any input.
Regards,
Percy Cuscaden
