I have one 4k HDR compatible TV at home. Everybody else in the household is streaming either to a laptop or a 1080p stream. However because ffmpeg does no tone mapping the image looks horrendous. Even worse when transcoding HDR content to another device that actually supports HDR, for instance to lower the bitrate due to upload limits when you are streaming remotely, the HDR meta-data is thrown away in the process. Unless you want to die to removal, cause like hell if I am going to rip things twice, then I would really like a word on why this can’t be done or a solution. If it’s a genuine hurdle that’s understandable, but you need to explain clearly why this is the case and not rely on some arbitrary member of the forum making assumptions.
PS: I know that you use ffmpeg for transcoding and you may be waiting on them to solve this, but given that HDR has exploded among the streaming providers and sales of UHD blu-rays are picking up you may wan’t to join forces with the ffmpeg community to solve the problem now as opposed to just waiting around.
This is why I posted a new request. There are tons of forum threads speculating why this can’t be done. However most of them are outdated. Also I couldn’t find a single one where the developers contributed. Hence why I said we can understand if this is hard, but only if we know why it’s hard. After all; other free software like VLC already support it and even Plex itself supports it in some cases although it’s very hit and miss and not very logical with some devices that support HDR working fine and others presenting washed out colours consistently. This is despite said devices working consistently just fine if you open up say Netflix instead.
And while your guide may be great to some it doesn’t actually solve anything. You just list a lot of reasons why nobody should bother with 4k transcoding unless they can store two copies of the film. You also list a bunch of reasons why transcoding, and for that matter playback, of 4k is difficult. That’s fine, but also completely unrelated to the question I’m asking. There are some other aspects in there that doesn’t make a lot of sense either. For instance you claim that the receiving end needs to have full support for the format it’s receiving through the entire hardware chain used for playback (due to HDCP). This is true for some hardware but not any type of device. The only part that has to support what’s being streamed with respect to HDCP is whatever the Plex client is running on. So for instance when I stream to my TV I can easily send a Dolby True HD audio stream to it. I don’t have any HDCP approved means of sending said stream to my stereo amplifier, but the TV has no issue down mixing the audio on the fly and sending it across the optical audio output as PCM. If I had an actual surround receiver connected via HDMI (using ARC) the same thing would happen if the receiver didn’t support the format. I don’t know, as i lack the hardware to test it, but I would hope the TV also sent the audio as multi channel PCM since that is possible with the HDMI cables increased bandwidth compared to optical. So yeah a lot of stuff mixed into your guide with some of it being very accurate and true and some of it sounding more like fear mongering even though it may not be outright wrong.
I agree, you know what would be super great? Supporting the tone mapping without telling us why we shouldn’t be trying to do it anyway.
My use case is that I want 4k movies or shows, and then set 1080p optimized versions of them up, instead of having to download 2. That should prevent many clients who don’t support 4k from transcoding on demand anyway - it’ll just pull the 1080p optimized version. I don’t care about the CPU hit if its doing the encode during my server’s spare cycles anyway.
This is exactly what I want to do. Please Plex Team, make this a priority. It does not have to be real-time, but for optimized copies this would be great!
i read that post of your and dissagree on many things , one of them is
so you need to know that 4K transcoding is a thing now and not everything 4k is HDR
and even if it is HDR 4k still that post tbh is wrong in many ways as the HDR get transcoded in few things just fine and having that as excuse for plex not to work properly isnt cool for paying plex users
there are many silly points in that post like this one
really ? are we going that low of naive thinking now ?
you know there are ppl who own multiple 4K capable direct play devices but still have to transcode for other members of the family or on mobile device etc… and making an entire collection of the library in another resolution isn’t a solution that is a huge hassle.
there are ppl who own 20+TB of 4k collection and which is nearly impossible to rip again in a short time to make 1080p versions or even have the capacity to make duplicates of what we have.
I did reply to your silly comments there and still you spread the same silliness every post you go to it.
A request for the same feature exists already, and it has more votes.
Therefore this one is closed, to prevent spreading the votes across several threads, even though they vote for the same (or at least very similar thing).
Votes are given back to the users who voted on this request. Please think of re-voting in the other thread if you still want it.
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