I am not sure if there are a lot of FOSS players that are better quality than MPV.
Infuse works well and is cool[1] but it’s a product and it’s probably just a few plugins/codecs away from being perfect.
Haven’t gotten through all the steps myself, so no: not sure about how it works but here are the things I narrowed down in general.
You need 3 things to have a proper working HDR experience:
- your source movie needs to be “HDR-enabled” (or be trans/encoded into it before the delivery)
- have the player that supports it well enough
- apparently, Jellyfin or other Nvidia tricks can also emulate/make it work, there is quite some extensive documentation in their docs
- there is an entire topic on what’s the source and if you also want to map it to SDR or have dynamic HDR on the fly, etc…looks quite complex and depends on your use-case
- your output device needs to be HDR compatible too: this can vary a lot based on the OS, the proprietary codec and other specifications. There are “a lot of HDRs” because it is not a standard yet (companies chime in quite heavily), hence it all depends on which specific one you’re targeting
- on my side, I do have those HDR-enabled devices that are doing great:
ASUS XG27UCDMG+LG C3(or maybeC2, can’t remember) and it works on both of those[2], YMMV and your tolerance/preference towards static vs dynamic HDR might also be a consideration - nvm, I do also have a
Gigabyte M28Ubut yeah, I never use HDR on it because it is very not good on it[3]
- on my side, I do have those HDR-enabled devices that are doing great:
Back to the topic of MPV, it looks like you might need to set a few settings into mpv.conf like
profile=gpu-hq
vo=gpu-next
hwdec=auto-copy
video-sync=display-resample
interpolation=yes
target-colorspace-hint=yes
gpu-api=vulkan
For the HDR detection, tone mapping, some more are needed apparently.
You could probably find your way out with some LLM/search on Reddit and cross-reference it with the official docs here, given how extensive they are I think that it’s definitely an achievable thing if tinkered enough with! 
TLDR: with MPV or Kodi, there is definitely a way to achieve what you’re looking for as a lot of enthusiasts on YouTube went over that process already. It is just not plug&play haha. 
I agree, that’s also what I do currently use on AppleTV ↩︎
I am not sure which spec I do use on both but I guess that since I do have HDR10 & HDR10+ & Dolby Vision & HLG & VESA DisplayHDR™ 400, I kinda brute force my way in and have it working with some of those
↩︎didn’t bought it for HDR if we’re honest, not the intent with that monitor hence it’s always SDR because the panel is IPS and not OLED
↩︎