I have compared the icc-profile= setting of mpv to Apple’s native QuickTime Player X on OS X 10.9.1 and found that the resulting colors are basically correct, but the image is too dark.
The following images are from a scene from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The first image is from QuickTime Player X:
This image is from a h.264 file (in an mp4 container) extracted from the BluRay version of the movie. I have compared it to the DVD version (played in Apple’s DVD Player) and to the version from the iTunes store, and the colors are exactly the same in these three versions and also match high quality still images I have from this movie.
So this image is arguably the reference and shows how the colors should look like.
The next image is from the same mp4 file, played in mpv without color management:
This image makes it very obvious why color management is a must; aesthetically, it’s basically another image (technically, it’s too red and too saturated).
The third image is again from the same mp4 file, played in mpv with color management (using the default rendering intent, which is absolute – choosing another intent does not fix the problem discussed here):
As you can see, compared to the QuickTime version, the colors seem to be more or less correct now, but the image is obviously too dark.
Now I wonder if this is a deficiency of the liblcms2.2.dylib library that mpv uses, or if it's just that mpv uses liblcms2.2.dylib with incorrect or suboptimal parameters?
Could somebody familiar with this part of the mpv code base comment?
I have compared the icc-profile= setting of mpv to Apple’s native QuickTime Player X on OS X 10.9.1 and found that the resulting colors are basically correct, but the image is too dark.
The following images are from a scene from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The first image is from QuickTime Player X:
This image is from a h.264 file (in an mp4 container) extracted from the BluRay version of the movie. I have compared it to the DVD version (played in Apple’s DVD Player) and to the version from the iTunes store, and the colors are exactly the same in these three versions and also match high quality still images I have from this movie.
So this image is arguably the reference and shows how the colors should look like.
The next image is from the same mp4 file, played in mpv without color management:
This image makes it very obvious why color management is a must; aesthetically, it’s basically another image (technically, it’s too red and too saturated).
The third image is again from the same mp4 file, played in mpv with color management (using the default rendering intent, which is absolute – choosing another intent does not fix the problem discussed here):
As you can see, compared to the QuickTime version, the colors seem to be more or less correct now, but the image is obviously too dark.
Now I wonder if this is a deficiency of the liblcms2.2.dylib library that mpv uses, or if it's just that mpv uses liblcms2.2.dylib with incorrect or suboptimal parameters?
Could somebody familiar with this part of the mpv code base comment?