Expected behavior when playing HDR content on non-HDR screens?

[peaksix]

I’ve gone down a rabbit hole regarding HDR content and I’m trying to make sense of it all. For the purposes of this post, I’m referring to Infuse on macOS on an M1 Macbook Air.

Does Infuse “know” it’s displaying content on a non-HDR display? And if so, what is the expected behavior for each file type? Is there any way to confirm what is actually happening (such as a “media inspector” window)? My guesses are below:

• SDR file - played in SDR (duh)
• HDR10 file - tone mapped by Infuse
• DV P5 - tone mapped by Infuse
• DV P8 - fallback to embedded SDR data?

Below are a few screenshots I took of a file I have in all 4 formats (from the M1 MBA screen).

SDR:

HDR10:

DV P5:

DV P8:

To my eyes, the HDR10 and DV P8 look similar, with the DV P5 looking a bit darker, and the SDR looking a bit brighter.

[james]

The expected behavior when connected to a non-HDR screen would be as follows.

• SDR —> SDR
• HDR10 —> tone mapped to SDR
• DV P5 —> tone mapped to SDR
• DV P8 —> HDR10 fallback layer tone mapped to SDR