Why does the color of HDR video change when I pause and resume in MPC-HC windowed mode?

Hi, I have a problem with MPC-HC when playing HDR videos in windowed mode. The video looks dull and washed out. If I pause the video, the picture becomes bright and colorful after one second. But if I resume the video, the picture becomes dull again.

However, if I wait for the picture to become bright after pausing, and then press F11 to enter fullscreen mode, and then resume the video, the picture stays bright and colorful for the rest of the playback.

I use K-Lite 17.9.4 Standard version, with MPC Video Renderer, Windows 11, AMD 5700XT, and Samsung OLED G8 monitor.

Does anyone know why this happens and how to fix it?

It is fault of Windows and the graphics driver that it does not stay in HDR mode.

Watching HDR is best done in fullscreen.

Press Ctrl+J to show the debug overlay in the renderer.

Make a screenshot for me when it is dull and when it is good.

Admin wrote:Press Ctrl+J to show the debug overlay in the renderer.

Make a screenshot for me when it is dull and when it is good.

I took some photos with my phone to show the difference between the paused and playing states, because the screenshots looked very distorted.
Please look at the petals in these two photos. The petals are much more vivid when the video is paused than when it is playing.
I also noticed that the blue and green lines of the debug overlay in the bottom right corner of the screen become more bright when the video is paused.

Paused


Playing

It doesn't look washed out. I think difference is usage of video HDR metadata versus the Windows default HDR metadata.

The behavior is caused by how Windows and graphics driver are working together. There is not anything the player/renderer can do differently.

It doesn’t look washed out indeed. However, I think the picture looks more like SDR when playing, and only shows the HDR performance when paused. I have used VLC to play the same video, but I didn’t notice any color change when pausing.

To better illustrate the problem, please watch the video I recorded.

You can try unchecking the checkboxes in the "D3D11 video processor" section in MPC Video Renderer. Then it will use shaders for scaling. Maybe that will help avoid the weird behavior of the graphics driver.

Admin wrote:You can try unchecking the checkboxes in the "D3D11 video processor" section in MPC Video Renderer. Then it will use shaders for scaling. Maybe that will help avoid the weird behavior of the graphics driver.

Is this the setting you are referring to? After I unchecked it, I saw from the debug information that any HDR video would be converted to SDR image output.

This is a driver bug and I can't fix driver bugs.