[FFmpeg-user] Is there a common build configuration with 10+bpc rendering capability in ffplay?

[Ted Park]

Good morning,

So macOS 10.15.4 is finally out of beta, and now has the ability to output HDR signals in video without having to use a serial video breakout box or anything. The 8 bpc firmware limit has been lifted, now even if you didn’t buy apple’s XDR display, you just plug in a compatible HDR display into an HDMI or USB/DP port on a post-2018 machine and you can get HDR10 signal, just like it has worked on windows for a while now.

So that’s great, it eliminates the asinine setting of having workflows that had their entire image processing pipeline in DCI or BT2020 only to have the monitoring output be tone mapped to SDR conformance, then put up on HDR displays.

But that is a handful of apps, FCPX, Resolve, etc. I’m finding that taking advantage of this with ffplay is going to be more involved, with SDL2 + OpenGL it looks like limited to sRGB, and with x11, the latest port of the x server and XF86V only support up to 24 deep. I’m not at HDR functions yet, simply trying to get a 2+30 bit packed argb format. This was actually the default in many cases for a while now at the framebuffer level, but the LSB’s were not cared about except for a few short routes in the iMac Pro and its wide gamut display, as well as a couple of the newer MBPs.

Would it be possible to get just the wider color range with SDL2? What is its behavior in windows, is it limited to getting yuv420p on all platforms? Or would a significantly reworked/different library be needed? (again I’m only thinking of 10bpc, sdr at the moment)

Regards,
Ted Park