[luci5r]

@popy , @Warner306 , @brazen1 & @bsoriano :

After many days of being crushed under critical work load and travel, I finally had a chance to sit down & test out some of the new configurations, versions & revelations which came to take place in this thread the last few pages. 

Installed Kodi v18 nightly with pOpY's fix.
Installed & configured LAV Filters, MadVR & MPC-BE per Warner306's new insight on GT 1030 compatibility.
Updated PowerDVD 18 to latest build and using brazen1's playercorefactory.xml, PDVD.bat & MPCBE.bat with minor personal adjustments.

Kodi's respect for PCF for external player switching ......... FLAWLESS!!! All props to @popy for the fix. PCF working just like Kodi v17.6. I'm able to seamlessly switch from player to player, both via rules defined in PCF and via the "Play using" menu. 

Playback of UHD HDR MKVs in MPC-BE ......... FLAWLESS!!! All props to @Warner306 for recommending the correct configuration for GT 1030. HDR switching is automatic & accurate. PQ is at par with PDVD, DVDFab, et al, motion is smooth, and able to use forward, backward controls without issues. Biggest of all, I couldn't get my remote control to work with DVDFab, however, with MPC-BE it works out of the box just like Kodi or PDVD. I have in fact completely removed DVDFab at this point, since I only had one full UHD ISO and I encoded it to MKV. 

I typically use STOP in external player (not Kodi), then Close (Alt-F4) the player. This worked flawlessly. No issues. Returned to Kodi as normal and continued operation as normal.

Able to hop from Kodi internal player to PDVD to MPC-BE and back in any order flawlessly. UHD HDR playback & switching is at its best. Everything works just as it should.

I do have 3D but that's on a different, non-4K setup so I cannot accurately reproduce the issue brazen1 is witnessing.

I'll be testing a little more and post back results. 

Just wanted to thank everyone for sorting out all these issues and great recommendations.

Thanks!!