Since the adoption of VP9 by Netflix in 2016, royalty-free coding standards continued to gain prominence through the activities of the AOMedia consortium with AV1. In the early years after standardisation, High-dynamic-range (HDR) videos tends to be under served in open source encoders for a variety of reasons including the relatively small amount of true HDR content being broadcast and the challenges in optimisation with that material. Fast-forward to 2022, there has been a rise of HDR content which is publicly available. In this presentation, we review the AV1 Playback, present challenges and various strategies to adopt for a scientific testing environment for HDR signal conformance and evaluation.