Can I override Maximum HEVC level?

Plex Players Smart TVs
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I recently came across a matroska video file with an HEVC stream that was incorrectly tagged with the Main Profile set to 5.2 despite only being 1080p @ 60fps. It seems that the Plex Client on Vizio Smart TV as well as on the Xbox Series X tags the file as incompatible and forces transcoding despite the fact that the client is more than capable of decoding a 1080p HEVC stream. If I enable “show video information” at the bottom of the video, it shows “App cannot direct play this item. Direct play is disabled.” Another file that is tagged as Main 10@5.1@High with a much higher bitrate plays fine without requiring transcoding, so I know that this is a software restriction. The “Maximum H.264 Level” setting has no effect on H.265 files it seems.

With this knowledge I set about changing the actual file to test my hypothesis, but could not find a readily available way to easily change the Main 10 Profile level easily. However, with some debugging using MediaInfo and some binary patching I was able to successfully change the file to identify the Main 10 Profile to 5.1@High. Afterwards, the Plex Client was able to successfully direct play the item without transcoding.

I’d like an option to override the max HEVC Profile level hard-coded into the app to avoid needing to manually patch every file I download. Does anybody know of an easy solution? Is this a feature that can get implemented into the plex client app at some point?

thanks.

MediaInfo output
Video
ID : 3
Format : HEVC
Format/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile : Main 10@L5.2@High
Codec ID : V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC
Duration : 23mn 54s
Bit rate : 3 290 Kbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 60.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 10 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.026
Stream size : 563 MiB (94%)
Default : Yes
Forced : Yes
Color range : Limited
Matrix coefficients : BT.709

Server Version#: 1.21.0.3616
Player Version#: 5.6.1
Platform Version#: 1.0.13_1.0.13.29_2031_0014

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