What is exactly patented in Dolby Vision?
There has to be some innovation to be patentable.
HDR10 and HDR10+ exist.
It does provide significant value worthy of patent protection.
The main thing they did was develop a nonlinear color space designed so that each “bit” of information provides equal value. This way no bits are wasted, making compression more efficient and have fewer artefacts.
The color space is also set up so that the “lightness” channel is accurate and brightness can be rescaled without introducing color shifts.
They also came up with a way of encoding the HDR brightness range efficiently so that about 12 bits worth of data fits into 10 bits.
The format also allows a mode where there is an 8-bit SDR base stream with a 2-bit HDR extension stream. This allows the same file to be decoded as either HDR or SDR by devices with minimal overhead.
Last but not least they work with device manufacturers to make optimal mapping tables that squeeze the enormous HDR range into whatever the device can physically show. This is hard because it has to be done in real time to compensate for maximum brightness limits for different sized patches and to compensate for brightness falloff due to overheating. Early model HDR TVs had to have FPGAs in them to do this fast enough!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_quantizer
[2] https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/5253154/Dolby%20208...
In practice it's an entire ecosystem of certifications, professional calibration of panels, efficient encoding formats, etc...
To reproduce the end effect of Dolby Vision you'd have to have a team of people liaising with television manufacturers, and makers of production software like DaVinci Resolve.
It's not a trivial task that can be done through open source. It's real work that costs money.
We can all hope and wish for open standards, but it's a bit like trying to come up with an open architecture for a railway bridge. It'll still take real work to customise it to any particular valley, the local geography, and the specific requirements. Dolby Vision is similar. The mapping from the full signal range to each specific panel is a complicated thing that requires quite a bit of work to determine.
When i watch See and compare the DV version vs plain HDR version on my LG C1 the difference is big
I have an (older) LG OLED, and haven't seen anything in DV that I didn't think would be just as good in HDR10, although I haven't compared the same content in both DV and HDR10 directly.
Dolby Vision is effectively 12 bit while using only 10 bits for encoding the actual signal. HDR10 is effectively... 10 bit. To achieve the same 12-bits of dynamic range they'd have to come up with a HDR12 format or something.
You can think of 8-bit SDR brightness as something like 0 nits to 255 nits of brightness. This is technically wrong because it's a nonlinear curve, but ignore that for a minute. Increasing this to 10 bits like with HDR10 gives you 0..1,023 nits with the same "steps". Going further to 12 bits lets you take this to 4,096 nits while continuing to preserve the same level of gradation.
The hiccup with this is that some displays have 600 nits of peak brightness and some have 2,500 nits. There are rare displays that can go to 4,000, and prototype displays that go to 10K nits.
HDR10 only goes to 1,000 nits.
Dolby Vision goes to 4,000 nits.
Does this matter now on some cheap LCD TV that only goes to 600 nits? Probably not.
Does it matter on an OLED panel that only goes to 1,000 nits? Maybe, because Dolby Vision has more true-to-life mapping from the maximum range to the display panel range.
Will it matter more with next-generation panels capable of 3,000+ nits? Almost certainly.
Then again, HDR10+ has dynamic metadata, which compensates a lot for its lower bit depth. Additionally, most smart televisions smooth the "steps" in smooth areas, largely eliminating the artefacts caused by HDR10.
At the end of the day, they're both significantly better than SDR, but Dolby Vision is a touch better, especially on high-end panels.
[1] - https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bt/R-REC-BT.2100-2-...
[2] - https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/hdr10-vs-dolby-vision
[3] - https://avdisco.com/t/demystifying-dolby-vision-profile-leve...
[4] - https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=16546620&postcount=...
This is opposed to HDR which has reference monitors and should look exactly the same on different, calibrated systems.
HDR10 and all the other stuff came along much much later