You'll want to be able to decode these files even if you're TV can't accurately display a billion unique colors, and there will be some benefit to letting your TV handle the 10-to-8 (or 10-to-6) bit depth compression. Because of the encoding advantage of using a 10-bit color depth, you'll see it utilized wherever there are quality/bandwith concerns, especially Netflix, 4k BluRays, and online video release groups, especially for animation. Computer animation benefits from this this most, especially since h.264 and h.264 have a way of saying basically 'this area is a color gradient between these two colors' which uses much fewer bytes than encoding the exact color of each pixel (necessary for dithering). Encoding dithering at h.264 can dramatically increase the file size, but encoding it at 10-bit and letting your video playback device figure out what to do with the extra colors results in a much smaller video file. TVs have tricks for doing this in post-processing just in time to display the image, and they're often better than trying to use tricks like dithering in the file encoding. So, do you really need 10-bit if it's all this trouble and your TV can't even display it? Maybe! Allowing your TV to choose how to represent a 10-bit image on a 6-bit display has some advantages. Putting it that way, 10-bit depth would be 40-bit color, but I've never seen it written that way. Assuming you have some kind of TV that can display 1024 different levels of red, green, and blue, you will also need to enable high bandwidth mode (sometimes called HDR mode or UHD mode) on the TV's HDMI port, and then set your video playback device/pc to ouput a 10-bit video signal using a 10-bit color profile like BT.2020.īy the way, when your Windows computer says 32-bit color, that means 8-bit depth for 4 channels (red, green, blue, alpha). I think most LCD screens can really only display ~64 different levels for each color channel, so that means most consumer grade eqiupment is giving you 6-bit-per-channel color. There is a difference between being able to decode a h.264 or h.265 video file a 10-bit color profile, and actually being able to display a billion different colors accurately. HTPC Software Solution for Internet and Live HDTV in America.Apple TV+ - ( r/tvPlus | r/AppleTvPlus).NVIDIA Shield TV - ( r/ShieldAndroidTV) ( r/theNvidiaShield).Steam - /r/Steam/ | /r/SteamOS/ - Gaming.Emby - ( /r/emby/ and /r/mediabrowser/) - Play/Serve.BEFORE POSTING, please read our Rules Wiki r/HTPC - Home Theater PC - Drive your home theater media experience with a PC or media device.

Dedicated graphics card for 4k tv