I brought this up briefly in the chat, but I think a thread might be more appropriate since it's a complex issue and it's probably worth discussion (and may help others out in the future).

As I've recently started making videos, I've stumbled issues with exporting videos in .h264, the most common codec out there at the moment.

Specifically, when exporting h264 out of Premiere CS6 on Windows systems, the resulting video will have the gamma values all screwed up and washed out looking on Quicktime players. Some players display correctly, but Quicktime and many web browsers in particular will have the washed out color-palette.

This is something you don't notice if you're just uploading to Youtube or Vimeo, because they seem to work around this problem somehow on their backend when they re-encode your original video for online distribution.

Digging into this online, I've discovered that this appears to have been an issue for years going back, and what's most baffling, no one seems to have a real solution for it. The most common suggestion I'm seeing is "encode it on a Mac, because Apple refuses to fix this", which is just insane to me.
Apparently it has something to do with a special gamma related tag that gets embedded in the exported file, which some players will read and others will ignore.

That makes the problem particularly annoying, because it means I can't just fix it by boosting the gamma before the export, since then the previously unaffected players will show the image over-saturated.

So, as I'm sure lots of people in this community work with Premiere and AE regularly, I'm wondering if anyone has run into this, knows any solutions for this, or what kind of export settings you recommend in general. I wasn't able to find an agreed upon solution for the gamma issue anywhere online, but that can't be the case, can it? How the hell have people been encoding their videos for the last decade?