UHD HDR on HD SDR TV

The player will have to do the HDR to SDR tone mapping. Some players do a better job than others

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As far as I'm aware, HDR is embedded/encoded in the actual disc, you can't just turn it on or off. As @Foxbat121 said, you will have to get the blu-ray player to do the down-sampling from HDR to SDR, if that function is available? It may be that your (I'm presuming) 4k SDR TV is fairly low quality, and may not be up to the task, when it comes to displaying decent quality 4k blu-ray movies. Good luck.

Thanks both, I was rather thinking that might be the answer....
I actually have a 1080 TV, however I think the set I bought was the only one with the extended version + without the horrible colour grading of previous versions.

I am actually playing on kodi running on pi, so there's no tone mapping option.

Handbrake now has an option to change colour space in the nightly build, which seems to do a great job, so I'll run it through that.

It does seem odd that you can't buy a version that UHD without HDR, however there's already so many versions, perhaps that's a good thing!

Thanks for your help!

@wcndave I think that's one of the main selling points with 4k UHD blu-rays. If they didn't have HDR and/or Dolby Vision, it really wouldn't be worth buying or streaming them. You really need to upgrade your TV to a 4k UHD one. Good luck.

Mark Beileiter said:

@wcndave I think that's one of the main selling points with 4k UHD blu-rays. If they didn't have HDR and/or Dolby Vision, it really wouldn't be worth buying or streaming them. You really need to upgrade your TV to a 4k UHD one. Good luck.

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I thought perhaps the 4k element was a good selling point. I wasn't really aware of the other features.
I only update my TV once every 10 years or so, too much electrical waste, however I'm probably approaching that point now

Donate your old TV to someone who cant afford a 4K set, and there wont be any waste at all.

@wcndave If you only update your TV every 10 years or so, you may want to have a think about getting yourself an 8k UHD TV. That way at least, you can, in some small way, try and future proof yourself for the next few years. I'm sure in 10 year's time, even 8k TVs will be obsolete. Good luck.

Davenlr said:

Donate your old TV to someone who cant afford a 4K set, and there wont be any waste at all.

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Nice idea, not always so easy in practice where I live. Anyway, given one can buy UHD TV without HDR, seems odd that the "only for HDR" is not more prominent on the BR box, but I do appreciate your help and comments, many thanks!

wcndave said:

Nice idea, not always so easy in practice where I live. Anyway, given one can buy UHD TV without HDR, seems odd that the "only for HDR" is not more prominent on the BR box, but I do appreciate your help and comments, many thanks!

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I'm not aware of any TVs (at least in the current marketplace) that are 4K without HDR. Some may give a lackluster HDR experience, but they still support at least HDR10 as far as mapping the colors and EOTF (essentially equivalent to gamma in SDR) properly. I'm curious how the Handbrake SDR conversion works. Check that it not only maps HDR to SDR but also 2020 to 709, as some use cases (mostly projectors) use SDR but are capable of interpreting and representing the color data sent in a 2020 container.

Another option is an HDFury device, inserted into the chain, which will perform the needed conversion, but if it's only this one movie (or three), some manual work in Handbrake seems like the right choice.