Hi everyone, the idea behind this shader is pretty simple:
I got tired of constantly tweaking sliders every time i played HDR content on an SDR screen and ending up with something that always felt a bit off, too dark, washed out or with colors pushed way too far so instead of chasing metadata flags or "official" modes, I tried a different approach and built something that just looks at the image and remaps it in a more human way.

What it does in practice is take whatever the player is already feeding to the screen and reshapes the luminance distribution while keeping colors where they’re supposed to be.
Dark areas stay readable without turning gray, highlights don’t blow out and colors don’t go neon.
It’s not a technically correct HDR conversion into SDR (wich is impossible in a lot of curcumstances), it’s more of a consistent reinterpretation that just works, without needing to hunt for the perfect combo of checkboxes (im looking at you "nits" slider and "method").

The nice part is that you just drop it in and forget about it, no profiles, no presets, no constant “by eye” calibration.
It’s probably not perfect in an academic sense but in real-world use it’s way more stable and predictable than what the player gives you out of the box.


If you’re curious about what’s going on under the hood, there’s a full README but the whole point is that you shouldn’t really need it.

quick notes :
Before using this shader, disable the two checkboxes inside "video/pixel_shaders" of potplayer settings menu that have "SMPTE" words in it.
Use this shader as a "pre-resize" to avoid problems.
You can decide the "order of execution" inside "pre-resize" by just changing the name of the shader into "AAA_hdr_to_sdr.txt" so it will get processed first or just use the "stack..." button to decide the order you want, personally i would process this shader first before anyelse shader.
It's written in HLSL language but for MPC (and forked version with similar name) you have to change the extension from ".txt" into ".hlsl", should also works with KMPlayer and almost every player wich support pixel shader.
It's recomended to use D3D11 video renderer (wich support also rtx super resolution and lot of other features)

Here's the link for the Github repo:
https://github.com/aston89/HDR-to-SDR-Perceptual-remapper-shader-for-PotPlayer

p.s. works wonder in conjunction with smart vibrance shader wich you can find here :
https://github.com/aston89/Smart-Vibrance-for-PotPlayer