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Author Topic: Are dark scenes on Netflix bright and washed out?  (Read 1963 times)

sevenlayermuddle

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Are dark scenes on Netflix bright and washed out?
« on: June 01, 2018, 08:52:30 PM »

Anybody else fed up with Netflix’s RGB encodings, which result in washed out-looking greys and blacks?   It is for all the world as if their material is recorded for RGB studio, where levels 0-15 are all black, but encoded as being full/PC levels, where 0-15 are shades of grey.   They have been doing so for many months, spoiled many a movie I have tried to watch.   That is at least, on my Firefox Panasonic TV, using the Netflix App.

Just short of cancelling my Netflix membership, I think I may have found an avoidance... which is to ignore the TV’s built in Netflix App, and watch it via a separate HDMI device.   In my case, that’s an Apple TV. I do have to configure it for RGB output rather than YCbCr, which I think breaks the chain of ‘default behaviours’ , effectively allowing a manual override, and Netflix looks right again.  Not sure if there’s going to be any downside.     Other Netflix-enabled STBs may also work with a similar tweak.

Nice to have made some progress, but how annoying that Netflix can get things so fundamentally wrong in the first place?   >:(
« Last Edit: June 02, 2018, 09:52:31 AM by sevenlayermuddle »
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Ronski

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Re: Are dark scenes on Netflix bright and washed out?
« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2018, 07:50:18 AM »

I watch a lot of Netflix on my 120" screen, quality is OK but not great, I was an Nvidia Shield and projector . Can't see I've noticed the colour being off.

One thing I have noticed and find really annoying is the forced subtitles are often missing, so you have to have subtitles on.

Forced sub titles are where you are watching something that is primarily in English and when someone speaks in a foreign language it will display English subtitles regardless of the subtitles being off.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Are dark scenes on Netflix bright and washed out?
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2018, 09:47:12 AM »

That’s interesting about the subtitles.   Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m more likely to notice, so will see if it happens.

Re the RGB black levels, not sure I fixed that after all.   In configuring RGB manually between the STB and TV,  I may just have been comparing ‘even worse’ with ‘as bad as usual’.   Trouble is, I spent so long playing with the settings there wasn’t enough time left to actually find a movie to put it the test, but I certainly came to doubt that it looked right. :-[

I’ve noticed the opposite effect on some Channel 4 material, specifically some bits of the recently relaunched “crystal maze” where dark items are far too black say, a dark patterned jacket or dark head of hair, just looks sooty black with no detail.   I think this happens when material contains full RGB, where 0-15 are shades of grey, but misconfigured somewhere down the line and treated as if it were studio RGB.  Thus, darker shades of grey all end up as the same absolute black.
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Ronski

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Re: Are dark scenes on Netflix bright and washed out?
« Reply #3 on: June 03, 2018, 07:54:52 AM »

Even though I've got my own cinema room, I've never been one to tweak settings , so have limited understanding of that side of things, but one thing did cross my mind, and that's HDR.

HDR uses a wider colour pallet,  perhaps if its a 4k TV you have a setting wrong somewhere, just a thought. Best place to ask would be on AV Forums.
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