How long to fully scan a video library spanning thousands of titles?

Ok - interesting - I don't have The Greatest Showman but I do have 1917 so I'll have a good look at that tomorrow - However pixelated blocks sounds more like encoding issues than playback issues, but I'm really curious to see what you mean.

 

I spent quite a lot of time on this today because I'm really interested to understand the cause of the artifacts you're seeing and I have a tendency to geek out at such things...

I first played an encoded HDR10 version of the movie. I tend to remux BDs to MKV for the first watch and then after I've watched the remux, I encode using Staxrip (hardware H.265 encoding) to an average of 25Mb/s and peak of 40Mb/s. This yields a copy that is pretty much indistinguishable from the original with the encode settings I use. My encode of 1917 is 24GB and includes the video track, the English Atmos audio track (of course untouched) and chapters only.

I watched from 2 minutes where the protagonists leave the tree up to about 12 minutes where they reach the front line.

As you mentioned I paid particular attention to the rifle barrels and helmets as they jiggled with the sky in the background. I paused on several occasions to try and see any encoding or playback issues.

The live bitrate during this scene was between 26 and 30Mb/s but never going above 30Mb/s.

I saw absolutely no encoding or playback issues whatsoever during this - absolutely nothing to give me any concern either from my encode or the playback. Every paused shot was completely clear of any artifacting and as I say, I paid particular attention to the rifle barrels and helmets although there is plenty of rapid movement across the whole frame where you might expect such artifacts had this been a poor encode.

I then grabbed the original BD and ripped to MKV using MakeMKV (this is why it's taken me so long to reply to this!) producing a Dolby Vision dvhe.07.06 BL+EL+RPU FEL remux with the English Atmos track and chapters only. This remux is 70.8GB in size.

Obviously dolby Vision playback of this from the Zidoo is the HDR10+ base layer only with RPU.

Again I played this from 2 through to 12 minutes and again paid particular attention to the rifles, helmets and all fast motion, pausing at many points to see if I could see anything worrying.

The bitrate for this file varied between 80 and 100Mb/s but never went above 100Mb/s in the instances I checked the live bitrate.

Again, I saw absolutely no evidence of artifacts or pixelated blocks as you describe (I assume you mean macro blocking by this), and of course this time I would certainly expect no encoding issues.

In both cases I was right up to the screen (this being a 75" LCD) with my reading glasses on

So I really have no idea what you were seeing - I'm assuming you were watching a remux and not an encode and as I said in my last post, pixelated blocks (or macro blocking) are generally a symptom of poor encoding. Do you have any motion interpolation switched on in your display perhaps? That's pretty much all I can come up with I'm afraid.

 

Wow, very thorough!

But I'm watching an "untouched" full UHD 1:1 image copy; straight off the presses, so to speak.

Artifacts are only present with the Zidoo, not the Oppo, so this is not an encoding issue period.

I have not adjusted any video settings of the Zidoo; it's straight out of the box.

I'm watching all on a LG 65".

Now, just to be sure all cables are up to snuff, I had ordered new "8K" certified HDMI cables for the two machines; forgot to order one from the Yamaha receiver to the LG so that will arrive tomorrow.

I may try to see if I can capture the artifacts on video to demonstrate...

 

Well I tried capturing the still visible artifacts on my phone but the phone's frame capture rate doesn't clearly capture the artifacts.

Some artifacts are not always present for any given frame (I know after rewinding over and over to capture it on my phone), but there are always some artifacts present at various points starting about when they enter the trench (approximately 3:10 minutes). As the "cut" scene with soldiers crossing from right to left, the ammo crate being carried sometimes has artifacts along the left edge of the crate.

Immediately after they pass, there are two soldiers walking the left side of the trench line and as the second person comes into view at the far edge of the screen his pack starts off pixelated as it appears in view. This artifact pretty always shows up on my screen, but doesn't get captured on my phone.

 

So yes, I'm in total agreement, with a 1:1 copy and no artifacts on the Oppo, then definitely not encoding - but I'm really stumped as to what it can be.

Of course there's always motion blur which you will always get at 24fps so maybe there's some incompatibility between your LG and the Zidoo, but I'm kind of grasping at straws.

I'd love to see what you're seeing - that ammo crate - nada!

What is also odd is that you say this sometimes occurs - with this kind of thing it's generally either always there or always not there - for it to be intermittent there has to be some change in the variables - really puzzling.

One thing I would try out of curiosity is to use Player Led (LLDV) Dolby Vision and see if that makes a difference.

Another thing to try is loading an HDR only EDID into the Zidoo which will play the HDR10 layer on its own and see if this issue has anything to do with Dolby Vision decoding.

I don't know which model you have, but this is an LG C9 EDID without Dolby Vision support, so if you load it (Settings/Display/Custom EDID) it will disable Dolby Vision output from the Zidoo:

https://mega.nz/file/5bRQ1JIS#VdLMRiGief0hRUDLgSpUrc40fddDn5ERRcIUclQCW_o

Set HDR to Auto and play the file and see if the artifacts are still there...