REQ: display settings - toggle HDR mode (nvidia)

[gibman]

It would be nice to have builtin support in E.G for turning HDR on/off.

The HDR button inside windows 10 display settings does not have an API associated with it and clicking it using autoit3 is not very reliable.

Nvidia to the rescue.
Nvidia has the nvapi which exposes a way to to turn HDR on/off. I dont think AMD has anything similar

I have a code example in C# if interested that does exactly this using nvapi.
Also madVR automatically toggles the HDR mode (using nvapi) based on meta data of the video file rendered.
http://madvr.com/

My usecase would be the native netflix windows app, which does NOT support auto toggling HDR mode. One have to do this manually.. sigh.

I could hook up my remote control to trigger this functionality within E.G.

regards
gibman

[kgschlosser]

give this a go and see if it switches to HDR mode for you. if it does then I can modify the thing in order to have it compile as a DLL file and we will be able to access it from EG.

Or you can use it as is if you want. You can launch the console program using EG that should switch the mode to HDR. and in order to exit HDR use the Find Window action and locate the console windo running the application then use the Send Key action and end the {Enter} key. this should turn HDR off.

[kgschlosser]

any word on if this thing works or not.. I see it has been downloaded 4 times.

[gibman]

yes.. it seems to work just fine

thanks alot !!

regards
gibman

[gibman]

any way to also change ...

colorformat : YCbCr422, YCbCr420, YCbCr444, RGB
dynamic range: full, limited
color depth : 8, 10 12 bpc

as seen in the nvidia control panel.

these values constantly revert themselves. probably when installing new drivers or OS updates.
would be nice to be able to set them once in something like E.G and be done with it

mabe NVapi has a means of doing it ?

regards
gibman

[kgschlosser]

yeah I can set something up like that. I will port the whole NVDIA API/SDK to python so that you will be able to pretty much make any of the changes you see in the NVDIA control panel from EG.

I will also be able to kick out some events for things like resolution changes, refresh rate changes, the HDR switching.... etc...

[gibman]

Ahhh man .. that would be so cool.

I guess santa do exist

Id be happy to test.

Merry christmas.

Gibman

[kgschlosser]

I wanted top let you know that I started working on this.. However..

I did not start with Nvidia. I figured if I was going to expose this kind of functionality I would do it for Nvidia and ATI at the same time and in a single plugin.. I personally own an ATI video card so I am able to test it.. I am going to go to purchase an Nvidia card to test with.. because of the nature of this I do not feel comfortable with having it debugged by someone else. I do not want to cause an issue with your computer.. I do hope you can understand my concern there. These types of APIs are interfacing directly with the driver which in turn is going to tell the hardware.. If something goes wrong it could cause a problem. Not saying that it will blow up your hardware or anything. Or maybe it will. IDK. I really do not want to find out on anything other then a test computer. Video cards are extremely fickle, these API's provide access to things I have never heard of and are hard to even find information about.

Intel users well... or rather "oh well"... looks like it's time to upgrade.

[gibman]

uhh that's sounds like really great news to me.
I'd be happy to test it - just throw it after me

exposing the entire API of either ATI/NVidia in the first release would probably be overkill.
I would just start out with the most basic stuff first and then see where it goes from there.

afaik no python wrapper exists for nvapi. There is one for dotnet c# though.
https://github.com/falahati/NvAPIWrapper

I extended this specific wrapper with a way to turn of /off HDR.
It doesnt do the other colorspace related things I mentioned.. yet.
Let me know if you want a copy for reference.

btw my gfx card is : nvidia gtx 1060 6gb vers.

looking forward for more info from you.

regards
gibman

[kgschlosser]

It's not hard in the terms of writing it... well errr... I didn't write it
I wrote a program that reads the h, cpp, c, and idl files and it spits out the python equivalent. If there are any dll's that may be associated I can take the dll and assign it to my program and it will read all of the public functions inside of the dll and if there is a reference in the source code that I am converting to any function contained in the dll it will write the code needed to acess that function

So it took all of about 20 seconds to port whole thing to python. all 28089 lines of it.

But I have to go through and fix any possible conversion errors. and then write wrapper functions/classes around the new code to make it "user friendly"

[Neytrino-OnLine]

kgschlosser, is there any news?

[kgschlosser]

I am working on it.. It is a fairly large project. I have finished up writing the Windows API portion of the monitor controls. and I am pretty much done writing the low level DDC/CI connection to the monitors to control the settings that are available on the monitor directly. I also finished up with writing an EDID parser to collect things like supported resolutions. I am about 1/2 way done with writing the Nvdia SDK port to access the video drivers directly and I am done with the ATI SDK port.

the Nvidia portion is about 26000 lines of code so far
the ATI portion is 16000 lines
the Windows, DDC/CI and EDID chime in at 6000 lines.

Thus far without the EG interface I am at about 54000 lines of code.

It is a fairly massive undertaking. I am going to guess that the code to interface with EG is going to be another 20000 lines of code or so.

[Neytrino-OnLine]

Cool! Will be wait and hope!

[kgschlosser]

OK I wanted to give an update to this.

I am at 72336 lines of code for the NVIDIA NVAPI port to Python. I do not know how much more there is left but it is one hell of an undertaking. I had to compile a DLL to wrap NVAPI because NVAPI is only released as a static library and python is only able to interface with a dynamic library. FUN FUN!

[gibman]

much appreciated!!

only recently spotted your progress.

Im currently using some autoit script that interacts with the nvidia control panel.
very brittle stuff. Looking forward to putting it to rest for good.

regards
gibman