Ok, so I have a movie that is from a 1080 HDR UHD blu ray.
Running an old mac mini as a server.
Streaming to apple tv 3 (non 4k). APT connected to a 4k capable TV.
Whenever I play the movie, my mac mini chokes becuase of transcoding.
I am guessing it is transcoding on the fly from UHD to 1080 because it is going through the APT that can’t output 4k/UHD.
So I sent the movie through handbrake to convert it to 1080 and copied it to the plex server.
Looks fine when I play it on my other mac via my plex homepage.
But when I try to watch it on my TV (through the APT) the colors are wrong. All dark shades become blue. Looks pretty bad.
Handbrake 1.3.3 & earlier has 8-bit internal paths and does not perform tonemapping of HDR to SDR. The output will not be HDR and will most likely have washed out colors.
The nightly builds of Handbrake now have 10-bit internal paths, so you can get HDR output. However, those builds have minimal testing and should be considered beta quality at best. See the Handbrake site and forum for additional information.
Converting 4K HDR to 1080p SDR to display it on a 4K HDR TV makes zero sense. Especially while using a 8 year old device that you’ve essentially hacked to make it work as a Plex client.
If the TV has a supported Plex app then use that. If not, drop a few dollars/euros/etc on a FireTV Stick 4K or Roku stick. If you’re married to the Apple ecosystem then get the Apple TV 4K. You can buy a refurb and save a bit of money.
