YouTube HDR... finally

[Kuschelmonschter]

YouTube HDR content is finally available!

You will find a playlist here. However, these clips will be played as SDR on Sonys for now.

With youtube-dl you can find vp9.2 encodings for those clips:

330          webm       256x144    144p60  156k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 2.38MiB
331          webm       426x240    240p60  256k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 3.87MiB
332          webm       640x360    360p60  485k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 7.35MiB
333          webm       854x480    480p60  909k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 13.83MiB
334          webm       1280x720   720p60 1991k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 28.18MiB
335          webm       1920x1080  1080p60 3201k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 49.70MiB
336          webm       2560x1440  1440p60 11166k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 170.23MiB
337          webm       3840x2160  2160p60 20122k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 335.45MiB

Those are webm however which the native Video app won't play.

We will see whether we will get support for it soon, even for the early 2016 models with the old MediaTek SoC from last year. At least Sony promised that back at CES:

Spoiler

YouTube will also start streaming in HDR quality later this year, using a new VP9-Profile 2 codec that brings HDR support to Google’s VP9 video format. Sony’s Motoi Kawamura, Head of TV Product Planning for Sony Europe, confirmed to FlatpanelsHD that the 2016 models will support VP9-Profile 2 and be capable of streaming YouTube in HDR. We saw a demo at CES and it looked very good.

Source

[stormyuk]

#double post, blames mobile#

[stormyuk]

I tried playing videos in Kodi and found it worse than Youtube. I get much better playback just using the Sony  Video player directly streamed from my PC (not transcode) via something like UMS.

I've never been able to get Sony or Google to comment on the YouTube app. The only thing I did get from Sony was it's upto Google to fix. By the time fixes come these 2017 Android TVs will be dropped for newer  models.

[Jecht_Sin]

@Kuschelmonschter All righty, so I did some tests. Actually I forgot that The World in HDR is already at 60fps, and that always played fine (no stuttering of any kind) in Video and Plex (I use Plex because it is the only one enabling the HDR with YouTube videos).

First of all I must say that plenty of so called HDR videos in YouTube are fake. They are only vp9, no vp9.2 available. I believe The HDR Channel seems to be the most reliable on that matter.

I have also played a bit on the settings. Using Video, and enabling both HDR and BT.2020 the image is.. Spectacular! I downloaded a couple of videos, this is the one that I'd like to discuss:

It is dark but it never has the awful "fog" effect (like too many HDR videos in Netflix), and it has an SDR version with an higher bitrate that, to be honest, looks in SDR quite similar to the HDR version with HDR/BT.2020 enabled. In either versions the play is butter smooth.

So I believe we can reach this conclusion:

• The vp9.2 Codecs/API are broken when recognizing vp9.2 videos as HDR. They also assign the wrong colour space when playing these videos (but this is old news, if you remember).
• As you said the TV hardware is more than capable of playing vp9 content, either SDR or HDR, at 60fps.
• At least Google does a quite good job on converting the HDR videos in SDR.

Well, nothing is really new under the Sun, after all...

PS: Watching the SDR version of the video with HDR and BT.2020 enabled the image gets complitely miserable!! 

[stormyuk]

Is this ever going to be fixed in the app? Is it a Sony or Google issue? Sounds like its an awful lot of hoops to jump through to get HDR Youtube.

[Kuschelmonschter]

2.02.08 fixes the micro-juddering for me. CPU load is still high and playback occasionally exhibits a severe stutter where several frames are dropped at once. Displaying nerd stats increases the frame drop.

[stormyuk]

Do Youtube 4K HDR videos display with HDR now in the latest version or just display at 4K without HDR?

[Kuschelmonschter]

No. I think this is up to Sony/MediaTek. They have to implement the Android 7 Nougat HDR APIs which they don't. The YouTube app relies on those APIs.

[stormyuk]

Yeh I really hope they do fix this although I am not holding my breath.

[Jecht_Sin]

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@Kuschelmonschter wrote:

2.02.08 fixes the micro-juddering for me. CPU load is still high and playback occasionally exhibits a severe stutter where several frames are dropped at once. Displaying nerd stats increases the frame drop.

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Seriously? I have read that in the YouTube support thread as well. I had a feeling (after some usage) that it improved maybe a bit, but I can distinguish between the 30 and 60fps because.. The 30 fps is more fluid. Otherwise it satys at 1440p@60fps, like right now (and I don't notice much micro stuttering. Not that I am extremely sensible to frame rates). Ok, now a different video went up to 2160p@60fps. Not impressed. 😞

[Kuschelmonschter]

Yes, on my ATV1, I now have perfectly fluid pans. No constant micro-stuttering anymore. But every few seconds, there is now one clean but severe stutter, dropping a bunch of frames at once. Probably runs out of sync and compensates by dropping frames?

I wrote a video renderer myself for the DVBViewer. I can perfectly distinguish the two cases. Constant stuttering typically occurs when fps and Hz don't match or when frame present call and VSync are too close, so  that a frame is sometimes presented at the correct VSync and sometimes at the next because it didn't make it in time. Skipping a VSync means that to compensate it, a frame will have to be dropped. So the renderer constantly alternates between skipping a VSync and dropping a frame > constant judder. I can't see this phenomenon anymore with 2.02.08. Now I see frames being dropped in bursts every few seconds.