HDR Plex for Windows

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Any update about supporting HDR in Windows 10?
My monitor supports HDR but Plex for Windows doesn’t
Almost all 4k movies have HDR, so I think is an important feature

Server Version#: 1.22.0.4163
Player Version#: 1.29.1.1974-a65b3ef3

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No, no update at this time. I definitely agree that HDR is an important feature.

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I assume this applies as well to the newly announced Plex HTPC? I was excited to try it, but if it doesn’t allow passthrough HDR10 at least I’ll still have to stick with mpc and madVR.

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That’s right. The two apps share the same playback stack. We’ll get there, HDR support in an HTPC app is important.

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Is Dolby Vision support a planned feature as well?

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Looking at this from an OS point of view, allowing Dolby Vision or any sort of HDR extension is very problematic. It is similar in ways to audio passthrough where an application needs to gain exclusivity of the audio device to perform a codec passthrough. While OSs do allow this for audio, extending this to the display doesn’t seem likely. The Dolby Vision metadata would change how all content on the display is displayed, including content that’s coming from other applications. You can see how this is inherently problematic for a general purpose PC.

Instead, the approach that’s appears to be taken by the industry for PCs outputting HDR is for the OS to have its framebuffer in a particular color space and all content is mapped into that color space which is then presented to the display. This type of operation precludes DV but allows for things like HDR10 and similar.

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I suspect external players are not an option, but I will say a lot of windows HTPC users have resorted to MPC + madVR simply because it lets us watch HDR content as HDR (Dolby Vision excluded) through AMD or NVIDIA’s private APIs. I know macOS is a whole 'nother story, but at least on Windows, there’s a path for passthrough.

I know the MPV devs have done work to support proper DXGI swap chain support, but never saw where it ended up. The Plex HTPC preview looks to be running MPV .32, are there plans to bump that up to .33 so we can invoke some of those updated d3d11 parameters in mpv.conf? They currently error out with the mpv-1.dll included in the preview build.

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