Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

This has always worked well for me, handling anything that’s thrown at it with ease.

Things may have changed since then, but when I first encountered the project several years ago it seemed like the thing that made this project stand out compared to other player projects was a big emphasis on correctness and accurate playback. There have files I’ve encountered that for example VLC will play with quirks (color reproduction is not quite right, etc) that mpv plays perfectly.

Hm, I've had (significant) issues with color representation playing back "HDR" media in mpv.

was the material purple-green by chance?

Yeah. I did try playing around with some of the colorspace options you can find googling, but nothing seemed to work.

That's a Dolby Vision Profile 5 file. A format that's very very proprietary. The only PC apps that can play them at all are https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p9zh5fl1bfk?hl=en-ms&gl=M... and https://firecore.com/infuse

You can play it with mpv, it depends on the hardware/drivers. It worked fine on a random Ryzen Lenovo laptop with Linux even though MacOS version of mpv couldn't play it correctly on M2 (even though Apple claims that M2 is compatible with the format).