Hello,
I’m trying to connect my PC (1060 3GB) to my TV (2018 Samsung un65nu8500) to play 4k HDR movies with Plex HTPC, but I’m getting a lot of color banding. It’s most obvious on the menu, but it does affect movie playback as well. When watching movies it looks more like noise than banding. I don’t have this issue with the plex win10 app or the browser.
I’m using a 2.1 HDMI cable. The 1030 and TV are limited to HDMI 2.0b.
The best settings I can select are RGB Full 8bpc 60Hz
I also tried to use HTPC on another PC with a 3080 and a MSI Optix G274QRFW. It can handle RGB 10bit Full @ 120Hz. It has the exact same banding issues, but way less noise during playback.
This is not the answer you want, but I can tell you that after a long time spent messing around with Windows video settings… Including Full/Limited HDMI range… I gave up and used a dedicated hardware video player. In one place it’s an Nvidia Shield TV, in another place it is the Plex app available in the Google TV.
This either costs you money or you have to tolerate the poor GUI performance if you are using the app in the TV. But I tell you what… I am much happier overall now that I never have to think about A/V settings any more. Finally, it “just works.”
I would go that route, but part of why I want to use the PC is it has the older component audio cables for my old surround system. If I upgrade to a shield, I’d have to also upgrade the surround sound head unit.
You are using the app with HDR turned on in Windows? In the past, I noticed that this introduced a lot of banding, not only in Plex HTPC but also in all other areas of Windows. This effect is amplified when the “image” is only a low-res compressed one. The genre images are probably also compressed - its just more efficient - but with Windows HDR turned on, it shows its ugliness. This is also extremely present with the chapter images when playing movies in HDR… Again highly compressed down-scaled images…
I have no idea if Plex could change this behavior. As far as I understand they “cache” multiple versions of images for different devices - hence the big appdata directory - maybe they could use higher quality one for the desktop devices.
I also see banding in the content, most of the time I put the disc in my Blu-ray player to see if it looks the same - and yes also with the “reference” player it looks the same.
#TeamHTPC - will never want to change to a streaming device any time soon…
