[Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e Questions & Answers] LeGi0NeeR:
Some notes from my recent observations on the HDR video playback in Tab S5e (Stock Firmware):

1. Tab S5e has a good hardware (SOC - SD670; GPU - Adreno 615; Super AMOLED Display) capable to play HDR video without problems. Playing the 1080p 60FPS HDR or 2160p 60FPS streaming videos by Modded YouTube Vanced just proves that.

2. But, there is a real problem for local HDR video playback with hardware support - the colors are slightly pale and washed as regards the same video played by YouTube Vanced or in other premium SAMSUNG devices. No matter which video player is used, no matter if Video Enhancer is on or off, the colors are washed... I tested almost all known video players for Android and all they show washed colors because all they rely on the native hardware support in the related devices.

- So, it seems that SAMSUNG has stripped the hardware support of 10-bit pipelines in the Tab S5e video codecs. Obviously, this is intentionally done by SAMSUNG (to sell much more expensive Tab S6?!) and can be easily corrected with a software update... But, at the moment, we can not play locally hardware accelerated video with rich HDR colors!

3. But, we have a little surprise: the SAMSUNG's competitive HDR format - Dolby Vision, plays on Tab S5e just fine in all glorious colors and hardware support even by the native SAMSUNG video player!

4. I tested on Tab S5e several dozens of 4K HDR & Dolby Vision videos/movies flying in the Net... The only video player that played all of them in their native resolution without lags, freezing, black screen, audio only, etc. (i.e. with good hardware acceleration), was

nPlayer

! All others couldn't handle with various video formats/codecs and especially with most of the Dolby Vision videos. nPlayer is amazing but... the colors of HDR videos on Tab S5e are still washed...

5. So, how to play offline HDR videos on Tab S5e with native rich colors?

It seems that only

VLC player for Android

can do that at the moment with the following limitations:

- Video Quality: up to 1080p 60FPS HDR (yes, the same limitations as in YouTube for mobile devices!)

- Hardware Acceleration: Disabled (i.e. without hardware GPU acceleration giving washed colors on Tab S5e)

- Recommended: Force video chroma - RGB 16-bit; Deblocking Filter Settings - No Deblocking; Frame Skip - Checked; Optimize Battery Usage for VLC - Not Optimized

(VLC can play videos with upper resolutions, e.g. 1440p 60 FPS HDR and up, but don't cry if video lags...)

6. Most of the videos/movies in the Net are 4k 60FPS HDR, so we have to downscale them to 1080p 60FPS HDR to watch normal rich colors on Tab S5e.

I personally use

VidCoder

to downscale the originals to 1080p 60FPS HDR. A good preset, for example, is [Vimeo YouTube HQ 1080p60] with video codec - H.265 10-bit (x265). It's important to use 10-bit codecs otherwise, the video output will not be of HDR quality! You will be really surprised to see the file size difference between the input and output video...

See the difference between the colors of one and the same hardware accelerated (washed) and software decoded (rich) HDR video by VLC on the attached shots below: