Does Plex Media Server support HDR to SDR Transcoding.

General Discussions
1

As the Title says… Does Plex support HDR to SDR Transcoding on TVs/Devices that don’t support HDR?

By this I mean doing a HDR to SDR transcoding with tonemaping done so the colors don’t look washed out.

2

Not at this time but it is being looked into

1 Like
3

This would be a huge help, because a lot of 4K downloads coming out now are HDR only. And the colors on SDR 4k/1080p just look like its colorblind and super washed out. I hope you guys add it! Otherwise, I’m going to have to split out my library for myself vs other users who have HDR televisions. Which would be a huge pain to manually manage and have two versions of every media file…

4

Something I would like to beta test :smile:

5

I think with the newfound ability to place our 4K titles on the server, HDR to SDR transcoding should be more important than ever. As of right now, I am having to keep the regular BD and 4K BD on my NAS simultaneously to account for the SDR TVs in my house. The ability to transcode would mean I could free up a lot of space.

6

@Balthazar2k4 said:
I think with the newfound ability to place our 4K titles on the server, HDR to SDR transcoding should be more important than ever. As of right now, I am having to keep the regular BD and 4K BD on my NAS simultaneously to account for the SDR TVs in my house. The ability to transcode would mean I could free up a lot of space.

Yup this is exactly what I have to do too… and it sucks…

7

@BigWheel said:
Not at this time but it is being looked into

That is great news! Thanks so much!

8

Fire Stick 3 does this by itself. But Plex doesn’t understand that so tries to convert everything :-/

9

@rxp said:
Fire Stick 3 does this by itself. But Plex doesn’t understand that so tries to convert everything :-/

Is this something Amazon put in specs or have you just noticed that it’s remapping color gamuts from testing?

10

Just noticed it playing back via kodi. There’s no settings but it works great

1 Like
11

That’s Kodi not the Plex App or Media Server…

12

@rxp said:
Just noticed it playing back via kodi. There’s no settings but it works great

So any device that supports Kodi could use the Plex for Kodi add-on to work around this issue.

13

@KarlDag said:

@rxp said:
Just noticed it playing back via kodi. There’s no settings but it works great

So any device that supports Kodi could use the Plex for Kodi add-on to work around this issue.
As long as you can Direct Play. PMP will do the same thing when 4K HDR is Direct Played. Transcoding is where HDR to SDR tone mapping is still a WIP.

14

Exactly I use Plex for Kodi and it works fine. My mum’s really happy cause she can finally get into all the 4k goodness on her 1080p OLED!

15

@rxp said:
Exactly I use Plex for Kodi and it works fine. My mum’s really happy cause she can finally get into all the 4k goodness on her 1080p OLED!
To experience the full 4K HDR experience both Kodi and mpv devs need to enable HDR10 passthrough instead of tone-mapping. There are OS, drivers and frameworks that need to be developed on all OSes still. Right now I use NVIDIA Shield+Kodi/Plex, AppleTV 4K+Infuse or the LG webOS Plex app to watch 4K HDR natively. Anxiously waiting for all the piecs to come together for all the different other client platforms.

16

@Achilles said:

@rxp said:
Exactly I use Plex for Kodi and it works fine. My mum’s really happy cause she can finally get into all the 4k goodness on her 1080p OLED!
To experience the full 4K HDR experience both Kodi and mpv devs need to enable HDR10 passthrough instead of tone-mapping. There are OS, drivers and frameworks that need to be developed on all OSes still. Right now I use NVIDIA Shield+Kodi/Plex, AppleTV 4K+Infuse or the LG webOS Plex app to watch 4K HDR natively. Anxiously waiting for all the piecs to come together for all the different other client platforms.

Maybe I misunderstand you but nobody’s thinking tonemapping is the end. But until plex can tonemap while it transcodes we have to keep two different files.

17

Any update or love for this? Be nice to have 1 file instead of 2.

18

+1 Now with the ability to rip your 4k discs and also to convert video with HDR this feature is really missing in PMS to compete with 4k playback etc.

I have media players that will play it back locally but when I am out and about and want to watch transcoded 4k content this would help otherwise the only solution is to have two copies one 4K and one HD.

Thanks

19

@BigWheel said:
Not at this time but it is being looked into

Any update on this considering: https://stevens.li/guides/video/converting-hdr-to-sdr-with-ffmpeg/