On today’s You Asked: Why don’t 4K-Blu-rays take better advantage of the HDR capabilities in today’s TVs? A quick clinic on how you can become an ace troubleshooter and figure out what’s wrong with your system yourself. And a brand new segment I’m gonna call “Feeding the Trolls … with medicine.’”
This week I received a lot more questions than usual about trouble with home entertainment setups. Folks need help figuring out what must be wrong after they’ve attempted to sort out issues themselves, but came up stumped.
First, it’s really tough to figure out A/V system issues remotely. The best thing I can do is offer some troubleshooting tips that, at the very least, could help narrow down the list of potential problems, and at best, may lead you to figuring out a solution yourself.
Let’s get into how to be a better troubleshooter. Some of these suggestions might sound obvious at first, but you’d be surprised how often folks miss steps when they are feeling frustrated or intimidated by their gear.
Freezing discs and weird audio dropouts
Dilithium 1701 — clearly a fellow Star Trek fan — writes to say they have gone through four different 4K Blu-ray players and each one has the same issue, which they describe as “discs freezing.” It’s random and inconsistent, and doesn’t matter if it’s DVD or Blu-ray: The disc freezes one day, but the next, it plays through no problem. And this happens on brand new discs, so it’s not a disc condition issue. They also point out that they have really good HDMI cables and are sure that’s not the problem.
Paul Hibbs from Staffordshire England says they have a Samsung QN95A paired to a Sonos Beam Gen 2 and they are experiencing weird audio dropouts – not completely dropping out, but the sound takes a radical dive in volume. A reboot or power cycle often fixes it, however, “when set to eARC, the sound will randomly drop to nothing, but when in HDMI mode, the sound never drops.” But they don’t get that sweet Dolby Atmos.
I understand eARC, but what is HDMI mode? I don’t have a Samsung TV setup, and I haven’t memorized every menu setting, so I’m sure the answer is obvious to a Samsung TV owner, but the way we approach figuring this out doesn’t really change.
Let’s use two examples to illustrate a troubleshooting principle you can use at home to get closer to solving the problem. It’s a seemingly simple concept, but how you go about doing it makes all the difference.
Let’s start with Dilithium 1701 with the skipping discs. They have gone through four different 4K Blu-ray players, which indicates to me that the problem likely isn’t the player — the disc itself isn’t skipping. So it’s not a disc-reading issue. We can probably rule that out or toss it to the very bottom of the list of possible causes.
If it isn’t the disc, and isn’t the mechanics of the player, what’s left? The most obvious culprit is an issue with the TV. How can you test that theory? Take the disc player to another TV and see if the problem continues. If it doesn’t, the issue is likely with the TV.
Now, what exactly it is in the TV that’s causing the problem is yet to be determined. But narrowing it down to the TV itself saves tons of time and effort moving toward a solution. Likewise, if it did continue on a second or third TV – ideally a different brand or at least different model — then we have to go back to the player. And since we know four different players had the skipping issue, we would want to look at some of the audio and video output settings that could be tripping things up. Because, again, it’s not likely to be the disc or the player itself, but what it’s putting out that’s the problem.
For Mr. Hibbs in England, we again want to narrow down the list of suspects. We do this by putting a different soundbar on the TV and a different TV on the soundbar. If you don’t own multiple TVs and/or soundbars, it’s time to phone a friend. Take your soundbar to someone else’s TV and run a quick test. Does the audio drop out at your friend’s house on their TV? If the problem follows the soundbar, the issue is probably something to do with the soundbar. If it doesn’t follow the soundbar, then it’s likely the TV. But you can confirm that theory by using a different soundbar. If there are no audio dropouts, it’s probably the soundbar that’s causing the issue. But if there are dropouts, the problem stayed with the TV — which makes it the culprit.
See, the more active components in a system, the more potential points of failure you have. Start eliminating them, one by one, by taking them out of the loop. If removing a component makes the problem go away, focus your attention on that one thing. You can also swap in replacement devices to see if the problem follows a certain device.
In both of these cases, we haven’t arrived at a final answer, but we’ve narrowed things down significantly. There’s more digging to be done. But before you call tech support or fire off an email to someone like me, if you can narrow things down to a very short list of suspects, that’s going to help drill down to the truth much, much faster. And, it might get you so close that you can figure it out yourself.
Next question comes from Kyle Dickinson and I love this one, because I’d never really considered it before, but it’s kind of fascinating.
Why don’t 4K-Blu-rays take better advantage of the HDR?
Kyle writes in wondering why 4K Blu-ray versions of big Hollywood titles don’t take better advantage of the HDR capabilities of today’s TVs. They cite some really interesting data that I’ll presume is accurate: Top Gun: Maverick maxes out at 617 nits, Oppenheimer never goes above 200 nits, and even the animated flick Inside Out 2 maxes out at 500 nits. Yet, there are many TVs on the market that can go much brighter than that. Kyle theorizes that creators may be concerned about TV’s HDR tone-mapping abilities and that the movies might look bad if rendered incorrectly.
I have some well-educated theories I’ll share. I also reached out to Maxine Gervais, who is a masterful colorist and HDR grader. Most of what I know about this actually comes from meeting Maxine at an LG event a couple of years ago. I’ve taken what she shared at that event and made some extrapolations. Let’s see how close I get to the truth.
Some film directors want their art to have as few deviations from the original theatrical release as possible. So, in the case of Oppenheimer, I suspect that any lift in average picture level is done just to make some compensations for the fact that not everyone watches movies in a totally dark room.
I’ve heard directors say, “I only need 100 nits to light a scene.” And not only does that give us some insight into the practical work that is done in film, it is indicative of an attitude that these directors have around how lighting determines the look, feel, mood, and character of their picture. I reckon that when Oppenheimer was prepared for streaming and Blu-ray, there were strict instructions given to the colorist and HDR grader not to exceed a certain threshold. Their work gets checked by the creator, so there’s little opportunity to sneak something by.
But there’s another, more practical factor at play here. I think a lot of folks just aren’t aware that most of the content we watch is usually sitting around the 100 to 200 nit range — the average picture level of most content lives in that zone. Only the occasional specular highlight really needs to punch above that level.
And, as you can imagine, you don’t want too huge a delta between the average picture level and a highlight, otherwise that highlight is going to be way out of balance with the rest of the picture. The times when that kind of drastic contrast would be called for are few and far between. One example: the flames in Mad Max: Fury Road. The director/artist wanted them to really leap out and seem uncharacteristically bright, a look that suited the vibe of the picture.
But can you imagine what it would look like if the fire in a living room fireplace was that bright? How much attention would it call to itself? It would look just outrageously ridiculous and out of place. That’s not adding to the experience; it’s a distraction.
Those are just two of the reasons I can imagine — though I’m betting those are the big ones.
But, there’s just not a huge push to make the at-home release look drastically different than the theatrical release. You don’t need to push the spectacular highlights that hard to get some stunning visuals.
Now, you might be thinking: But look at the aggressive HDR implementation in original shows on streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and others — they’re doing it! Yes, they are, but the big difference is that content is being made for viewing at home on a TV. It’s not headed for the theater. When you make content headed straight for HDR TVs in folks’ homes, it can be mastered for that experience.
‘Feeding the Trolls’
Now we come to a new segment I’m going to call “Feeding the Trolls.” I’m calling it that because, well, I don’t have a better idea for now. But also that’s the risk I’m taking here. You don’t want to feed the trolls, because they have a huge appetite for attention and once they know where they can get their food, they like to come back time and again.
For over a decade now, I’ve enjoyed a very civil, thoughtful, kind, considerate, and honest audience. There’s an occasional deviation from that norm, but for the most part, this channel has been an oasis in an otherwise very dark internet forum.
Sometimes, though, I see comments that are so far off-base, or just plain wrong, that I have to weigh in. Especially if it involves character assault on my team — I just won’t stand for that.
With that in mind, I want to talk about some of the comments I saw on our recent announcement for our new memberships program as part of the YouTube channel. I tried to address some of the comments with a comment of my own: “Hey everyone! Seems like there’s some confusion about memberships so I want to clarify: Memberships get you bonuses and perks — nothing about the content we’ve always made changes — it will continue as it has. If you don’t opt in for a membership, you lose nothing.”
In response, Mike Brown8580 wrote: “There is no confusion, you YouTube people with crazy followers get PAID already, now you want more money … humble yourself.”
Now, I think most folks can see this comment for what it is. There’s so much wrong here I don’t know where to start. “You YouTube people,” for example. What does that mean? If I give the commenter the benefit of the doubt here, which I feel like is a huge stretch, I can imagine they meant larger YouTube channels that get lots of views. And you can fairly infer that more views equals more money. I guess what they are trying to say is that we are rolling in dough already, and that this membership thing is just a money grab.
My knee-jerk reaction is to point out that this person clearly didn’t do the math on how much YouTube pays for views, probably isn’t familiar with the size of Digital Trends as a publication or the size of the team involved in running this channel, and has clearly made a wild extrapolation based on this popular notion that YouTube creators are just out here raking in millions of dollars.
But, let’s set that aside and focus on the idea that memberships are a money grab.
Memberships are not a money grab. First, as I explained in my pinned comment, we aren’t changing anything about how the baseline of the channel operates. We didn’t take anything away and put it behind a paywall the way some publications do. We only added new stuff and made them perks of a membership.
Second, there are perks and bonuses that can only be made available to members, and that is YouTube’s setup, not ours. Badges and emojis, for example, are only available through YouTube’s member program — we could not have offered those outside of memberships.
Third, some of the stuff we are offering to members is value-add. I get paid to make a baseline of content, making about three videos per week, which is a lot. It is a more-than-full-time job. If I am going to make extra content or spend hours trying to help folks out as a consultant, that service has value. I don’t think any mechanic should spend multiple hours a week working for free. That’s disrespectful to the mechanic and the skills they have worked hard to develop.
Fourth, I hate that we’re even having this conversation over an opt-in program that is really designed to help bring us closer to some of our most enthusiastic and loyal supporters. I don’t think we’re going to make any big bucks off memberships — not for a long, long time. Bringing joy and fun into folks’ lives with something special … that was our motive. No amount of accusations can change that from being the truth.
Those of you have been with me for a long time: I think you know what I’m all about. I’ll let my character speak for itself.
And I want to thank you again for being here. Thanks for being kind and considerate. Thanks for making this an awesome community. If you think memberships are fun and cool, we’d love to have you join. If not, that’s totally cool, too. We’re going to be here for you just as we always have been. And I think you’re awesome.
