Vlc screenshots of 4k look gray and washed

[VideoMilk78]

Haven't been able to find much on a fix to this.
From a 4k HDR disc
What it looks like when playing

VLC snapshot


On Mac m1 with newest version installed.

[jagabo]

Your source is High Dynamic Range (HDR). It needs to be tone mapped for display on a Standard Dynamic Range display. I don't know if VLC supports HDR.

[VideoMilk78]

Any reason why it looks normal when I play it in vlc? I'm not doubting you just curious...

[jagabo]

I believe VLC is sending the HDR metadata to its player. The player then passes that information along to the video renderer. The render then modifies the pixels as they are sent to the monitor. But the contents of video memory, what's used to save the snapshot, does not include the HDR transformation.

[ProWo]

Must be a mac thing. In Windows, VLC snapshots of HDR content are created and displayed correctly.

[jagabo]

I don't know if VLC on the Mac has a choice of different renderers, but if it does you can try switching to different ones to see if any works better than the others.

[VideoMilk78]

I don't know if VLC on the Mac has a choice of different renderers, but if it does you can try switching to different ones to see if any works better than the others.

Appreciate it, will give it a try later.

[IndigoZephyr]

Use PotPlayer it uses HDR Correction.

[VideoMilk78]

As I stated I'm on Mac and Pot player doesn't support Intel Macs much less an arm 64 Mac which is what I have

[davexnet]

Is OpenGL available to you?
There was a soloution in an old Reddit post using OpenGL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/rbilpn/hdr_to_sdr_tonemapping_feature/

but it appears OpenG is deprecated on MacOS:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/O..._concepts.html

Perhaps you can check the relevant VLC preferences at tools/preferences/all/video/output modules
and see what's available