I wont go into a point by point response this time because
A) you are drawing a lot of assumptions about me which arent necessarily true (e.g. the original assumption on basing my observations with a display/displays incapable of handling proper HDR)
because thats what you gave out as examples? what do you think a layperson would assume when you say there aint much difference between HDR and HDR10/DV and I play HDR content on my HDR800 device?
This time around you have assumed that I have tested only with ATV/ not tested remuxes / not tested physical disks
And also assumed (probably) usage of a non ATMOS setup
And also assumed I am comparing remuxes with 15mbps streams (when I had clearly stated 40)
you didnt? you just said and I'll quote, "my personal take is that anything over 40mbps /hevc main10 /DV or HDR10+ gets visually indistinguishable from a physical disk.", and btw which stream have you seen with a 40mbps bitrate? On the peril of making another assumption and correcting what I said in my previous post, 40mbps is the
max advertised bitrate on ATV+, and in general it can go anywhere from 15-25/26 mbps for a 4k movie but yeah sure you'll get a 40mbps stream on ATV+, the only streaming service that offers these kinds of bitrates is Sony's Bravia Core or BCore, around 80mbps and that too doest not have much content in that bitrate, and while we are at it, lets move off of bitrate comparisons, bitrates are
not a good comparison for different rips, its a very rough and largely inaccurate comparison depending on quite a few assumptions to work. I shouldnt have brought it up in the first place, I think thats where this convo derailed.
On a side note, I may not have super discerning eyes but the color variation on the links you sent are so stark that even a non video enthusiast would notice that instantly during actual playback.
Which is why I mentioned earlier as well that rather than believing a post from a random unknown tester on the interwebs (e.g. the page you linked to) or Youtube, I would rather trust my own tests, equipment, configuration and eyes (or take inputs from someone i know).
There is no means for me to know if the setup tested by this unknown individual (from your links) were configured or tested correctly which i strongly believe is not the case here
(for instance the ATV frame in the general comparison is almost comically bad/blurry/low res - either intentionally or due to lack of attention to detail by the tester)
did you perchance go through the other images? on peril of
another assumption, I'm gonna assume you are talking about the first pic in the links I sent which just show the color space and not the actual image, if you would go through the other images in the set you would have seen "fairer" comps, but yeah my bad, I was too lazy to go digging around forums in trackers to get other comparisons which are mapped on a frame to frame basis.
BTW FWIW the shield is not capable of handling profile 7 as intended - it processes only the base layer. In fact as things stand, even the cheap firestick 4K is arguably the better media player of the 2 than the now hopelessly outdated shield (and before you assume again, Yes, I have used a shield, )
never said Shield is the best? I said its better than the other devices listed like the firetv stick etc etc, the main USP of shield is that it has Atmos Bitstreaming support, almost all players except for Blu ray ones have trouble actually playing Atmos, either the atmos is ignored or its transcoded, Shield and Shield TV Pro have the best support for Atmos outside of traditional Blu-Ray players or something like a Zidoo but then you need to hack around Zidoo's incompatibility with Plex/Jellyfin (not sure if they got their shit together now, its been a while since I looked into Zidoo)
B) We (and I am equally guilty) are digressing massively from the core thread topic - If you do want to pursue this discussion further, happy to continue on a separate thread
Finally something we can agree on, I did derail this thread quite a lot, but yeah, feel free to create another thread and I'll give you all the comps you want once I get around to digging up old threads in my forums and getting those comps