Support for rendering HDR video on HDR displays?

[cosmin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

For visually analyzing the quality of HDR videos it's important to be able to display the video in HDR on HDR displays. Currently the videos can only be rendered in SDR.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add support for visualizing PQ and HLG, perhaps by adding a dropdown next to the Color Conversion dropdown.

Describe alternatives you've considered

HLG content is reasonably backwards compatible with SDR so it works reasonably well for most issues but certain chroma artifacts in particular can look very different when viewed in HDR and SDR.

[ChristianFeldmann]

Hi!
It is true that we do only support conversion of the YUV values to RGB 8 bit and then we display them. But I think you are thinking about HDR display on HDR display, right? I have no technical overview of what is possible on what platform. But I think this could potentially work on at least windows ...
Do you have an idea how this is possible with Qt or openGL?

[ValeZAA]

Davinci 19 beta 4 added PQ native rendering and mpv and Camera Raw of Adobe also have it. Camera Raw may also use OpenGL + DirectX, probably not the same OpenGL that is used in Photoshop itself for SDR 10 bit color. In practice see #443, of course in Davinci 19 the 10 bit SDR is a separate option.

[cosmin]

@ChristianFeldmann I did some searching and it does look like Qt added at least some support for HDR rendering, I see several changes in Qt itself related to HDR video playback and HDR surfaces. But I'm not really sure about the specifics.

[supernova-jpg]

Hi @cosmin @ValeZAA and @ChristianFeldmann,
I have developed an implementation for this feature on Windows11, EIZO CG319X monitor and just submitted a Pull Request to address it: #671
To support native HDR10 rendering without impacting the existing SDR pipeline, this PR introduces a GPU-accelerated HDR10 viewing pipeline built on Qt 6 RHI (using D3D12 on Windows) for 10-bit YUV sources.
Here is a quick summary of what this implementation brings to YUView:
HDR Transfer Functions: Added support for PQ (HDR10), HLG, and Linear (scRGB) rendering modes for 10-bit analytical viewing.
GPU Acceleration: Raw 10-bit YUV frames are uploaded directly to the GPU to bypass CPU conversion bottlenecking, using shader-based EOTFs.
Preserved Overlay Tools: Overlay utilities such as the grid, zoom box, split view, and pixel value inspector remain fully functional in the parallel HDR path.
Additional Enhancements: Includes raw YUV frame caching for smoother playback, HiDPI-aware zoom compensation, and a YUV pipeline refactor.
Since HDR rendering and swap-chain presentation can be highly hardware-dependent, I would really appreciate it if you could test this PR on your HDR displays and share your feedback.
Looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions!