I had actually always thought that because in my testing only Apple TV could play back P5 Dolby vision when connected to a non-DV TV that Plex was taking advantage of Apple’s frameworks (which in my head made sense bc Apple TV has a DV license at the hw/os level). But I have zero understanding of the minutiae of licensing agreements.
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I encountered the same situation. The Dolby videos that I could play normally before are now not playing properly.
However, they can still be played on the iPhone Plex client.
I hope this is a good sign; perhaps Plex is reworking its player components. I’ve heard they are restructuring the client.
As for legal issues, I think if Infuse can do it, then Plex has no reason not to. Overall, I still hope to see an official response regarding this.
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I wonder then how Jellyfin, a free and open source project, is capable of doing it?
I am seeing same problem. Just started happening.
Hey y’all,
Two things to answer the general questions:
- For Dolby Vision Profile 5 we always play through Apple’s native player and the media cannot be transcoded because of Dolby’s proprietary colorspace/metadata. Also like others mentioned Profile 5 does not have an HDR10 fallback which is what we use in other scenarios.
- There should have been no recent changes to how we play this media. We have not removed or added any different support.
The error message seems to be around the decision portion before playback occurs.
If anyone has time, could you send me your app logs and a sample file?
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The problem started with the Plex App 8.43 update. My Apple TV suddenly wouldn’t play the files that played fine prior to this update.
I delayed installing the 8.43 update on my iPad and was still playing these files fine with 8.42, until I accidentally updated it to 8.43 and the same error then appeared.
The error from the server logs:
Could you provide a sample file and the full app logs?
I’ll need to see the exact decisioning the app is choosing to send to the server.
We did release a change only for transcoded media to not play hevc in certain scenarios.
Dolby Vision Profile 5 always has to be direct played though.
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Thanks for looking into this. Here’s a link to a sample file that is representative of this failure.
plex_logs.txt (19.4 KB)
These files used to work previously on the same hardware a little over a month ago via Direct Play.
As a final anecdote that might help, if you run any of these files through gacopl/dvmkv2mp4 they will behave again which is just remuxing the same data into an MP4 container, but obviously shouldn’t be necessary.
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Thank you Craig, for looking into this! Hopefully this can be resolved soon.
THAT’s the problem - Direct Play has stopped working! This has nothing to do with transcoding.
Correct.
We didn’t change anything with Direct Play for the affected releases.
We did change something for transcoded decisions.
Either way, that functionality for “decisioning” is where the bug must be.
Only sharing that tidbit for anyone interested.
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TY! I’m looking into this 
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Thanks Craig!!
Craig,
If my info is helpful, great, or if I can provide more info let me know.
I’ve been watching a series, I’m now at S2:E3. I was 26 minutes into S2:E3 when I paused the show and went to sleep. Next time I tried to resume/play E3 (different TV and Apple TV (hardware) it failed. Here’s the thing, S2:E1 and S2:E2 both are DoVi. I have tried watching S2:E2 and S2:E3 on 3 different televisions and their respective Apple TV devices. All 3 behave the same way, S2:E2 plays just fine (see picture of plex server streaming it) and all also now fail to play S2:E3, yet at least one of them played S2:E3 just fine for 26 minutes. All clients update automatically. PMS plexmediaserver/public,now 1.41.3.9314-a0bfb8370 amd64 [installed], running on Debian 12.
Did you get the information you needed to investigate the problem? Let me know if you need any more samples or logs
Yes I do believe I found the issue here.
Is anyone having issues that is in the TF beta? It will be faster for me to make a build and quickly validate the fix rather than wait for the next beta period.
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I am in the TestFlight beta and can verify.
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I can test as well if needed.
Any updates?
