Playing with the betas that juuuuuust dropped. Is the HDR tone-mapping only when playing back with direct play? Noticing if my players transcode they don’t tone-map. Also, noticing if I play back on an Apple TV 4th gen (but not my ATV 4K) that videos don’t tone-map even if they direct play. Just making sure that is expected behavior
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Yes, tone mapping only works with direct play with the new player.
Try going to Settings -> Display Type and select SDR and see if it helps.
Hey, so I tried this a little more and can’t really see what it is doing, I am guessing not much in my use case. I have:
Apple TV 4K - connected to a 4K HDR TV
Apple TV 4th Gen - connected to a 1080p TV in the bedroom
iPhone X
iPad Pro 10.5
When I play with the experimental player on or off on the iPhone X, iPad Pro 10.5, ATV 4K, they all seem to trigger HDR and look identical. When I play with the ATV 4th gen on the 1080p the 4K HDR videos are transcoded and washed out.
I’m guessing the tone-mapping is only for direct play of HDR material on a 4K SDR displays WITH a 4K AppleTV?
I hope tone-mapping for transcoded files can be supported soon. It would be great to have only one copy of my 4K HDR files, that can still play back fine when I am away from my LAN. Thanks!
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That sounds wrong… right now our mpv player doesn’t support real HDR, so if you see real HDR that must be going through AVPlayer and not mpv.
If you play HDR content in a SDR display, assuming it doesn’t need transcoding for other reasons, it should use mpv and apply tone-mapping. You can force the app to think it’s a SDR display by going to Settings -> Display Type and select SDR. Have you tried that?
If it doesn’t work, can you share logs and screenshots/photos of how they look?
Thank you!
Thanks. I am set to SDR, but since I have an HDR display I keep the range selection set so that it switches to HDR when available (who would want to only have SDR images when HDR is an option).
So, it sounds like this tone-mapping is just for people with SDR displays WITH AppleTV 4K? Or people with iOS devices that don’t support HDR?
Thanks!
If you have an HDR TV and an Apple TV 4K, you’d want the real HDR which is only available through AVPlayer today.
Tone mapping is for users playing HDR videos from an Apple TV 4th gen (1080p, not 4K) or in a SDR display.
HDR video + HDR display + Apple TV 4K = NO tone-mapping (not supported by mpv-based player right now, falls back to the old AVPlayer)
HDR video + SDR display + whatever Apple TV = tone-mapping (handled by mpv-based player)
HDR video + HDR display + Apple TV 4th gen (1080p) = tone-mapping (handled by mpv-based player)
I hope that makes it more clear. Right now it’s a bit complicated, we’re hoping to support the first scenario with mpv soon, sorry 
Thanks for the reply, not confused this is what I originally thought.
In my earlier message I mentioned I tested with four devices, which included an AppleTV 4th gen (not 4K) on my bedroom TV which is 1080p. The 4th gen AppleTVs don’t include the SDR setting because they don’t need them. This is the device I expected to tone-map, even though I tested the other AppleTV (4K) and the iOS devices.
AppleTV 4TH gen + 1080p TV does not tone map with any HDR videos I play. I am guessing this is because it cannot direct play 4K movies and there aren’t really many 1080p HDR movies? Thanks!
My bad, I might have misunderstood you, sorry!
I will look into that in case there is a bug in the app and try to fix it ASAP. Thanks for the feedback!! 
Thanks! I think it must be that they are transcoding. Tried a ton of 4K HDR clips on the 1080p set.
I guess I missed the most obvious bit 
Since Apple TV 4th gen has a much less powerful CPU that can’t handle 4K videos, we force transcoding them to 1080p. That and the fact that the PMS transcoder doesn’t support tone-mapping (yet)…
Sorry for all the confusion
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Gotcha! Thanks for clarifying, fingers crossed for tone-mapping from PMS soon
The release notes of the Apple TV player (v 1.37) ought to reflect this limitation. Spent a good amount of time last night trying to get 4K HDR content to be tone mapped on a 1080p SDR TV w/ Apple TV 4K before giving up. I’ve yet to come across any 1080p HDR content. Cheers for bringing these features to us, though some extra clarity would’ve been good. (: Surely trying to play [transcode] ‘new’ 4K HDR content on ‘older’ 1080p SDR displays would be one of the most common scenarios for this tone mapping feature?
Now PMS needs to support tone mapping to enable this on 1080p SDR TVs if I understand correctly? Ever since the player announcement I’ve eagerly awaited the tone mapping to be introduced to enjoy 4K HDR content across the board, yet it wasn’t the player I should’ve waited for…! Is there somewhere we can track the development of tone mapping in the media server transcoder?
Sorry about that 
Right now the development of tone mapping on the server side is on hold, since other work with higher priority popped up. AFAIK there is no place to keep track of it, sorry.
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Thanks for the update, much appreciated! I recently came across some 1080p HDR content, and while some settings worked and others didn’t, the tone mapping worked in the end as expected. ‘Convert Automatically’ obviously isn’t recommended, as it relies on PMS to transcode (even for ‘Play Smaller Videos at Original Quality’ in my experience). 
However, the in-app (tvOS) HDR setting ‘Auto’ would make playback fail, while switching it to ‘SDR’ made it work. I would have expected ‘HDR’ being the only setting there to not work – how auto is the ‘Auto’?
+1 to add support to transcoding. While this was a nice thing to add I imagine the current tone mapping support isn’t really useful to nearly as many people as server level support would be. I have several older streaming boxes around the house that cannot direct play 4K HEVC files, so they need to be transcoded.
while it is awesome they are able to implement some tone mapping into some clients,
nothing needs transcoding, you can simply keep your 4k content in separately libraries and not play 4k content on non-4k devices.
If you still have a lot of non-4k devices to support, then simply keep a normal 720p copy around in the non-4k library.
yeah yeah, ‘I don’t want to keep or manage duplicate’ /cry
ok well then go ahead and transcode, wasting the cash and energy to support 4k transcoding with washed out colors just to save a little disk space.
Wow, what a rude response. About half my movies have now been upgraded to 4K. Yes I don’t want to spend the time to manage and convert another copy. The entire beauty of Plex is how easy it makes this kind of stuff. I have the proper hardware to convert on the fly already, so why would I avoid transcoding? People have different use cases, you don’t need to talk down to someone because of it. Personally I find your idea of a separate 4K library cumbersome and unintuitive. But if that’s how you want to use it what do I care? Seems like a total stop gap solution though.
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it is the simple reality, sorry if you think it is rude.
you cause your own (transcoding) pain by trying to force feed content into devices which simply are not compatible.
It is like going to the doctor because your head hurts from banging it into the wall. When the doctor says stop doing that, you continue to do it anyway.
Everyone (including myself) want 4k transcoding, but few want to pay the costs, and most want to blame plex for not supporting what they want to do, even though what they want is both expensive to do and totally not needed in the first place.
transcoded 4k to non-4k clients is not any better than direct playing 720/1080 content (and in fact is worse in most cases due to the lack of hdr to sdr conversion).
I understand it’s worse than a good 1080p copy. Truth is I’d rather just deal with a single copy. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes trivial, just like transcoding 1080p used to be difficult.
I can currently transcode 4 4K streams just fine, if they could get tone mapping going there would be no downside.
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In theory, yes. In reality, no.
One doesn’t just need a “4k device” to play 4k content…
- The 4K file must contain no PGS subtitles. If it does, this forces the player, ie a Roku, to request the server to transcode the 4K HDR file into a 4K SDR file w/the subs.
- The 4K file must not exclusively contain TrueHD or DTS-MA if the 4K client is not hooked up to a high-res audio capable device. If it is not connected to such an audio-capable device, the client will transcode regardless if the display is 4K HDR capable.
So in reality, currently you must hard code all PGS subs or delete PGS subs from 4K files and mux in SRT subs. And must convert the high-res audio into AC3 or DTS or keep an AC3 or DTS copy muxed in the 4K file for compatibility purposes.
Again, in reality, there is a plethora of incompatible situations out there in the “4K client world.” Incompatibilities are usually no problem with plex. It transcodes the audio or video, so what? The output is still watchable. Unfortunately right now 4K HDR is a special case where if it transcodes the output is unwatchable. Thus end-user who wants 4K files must go to great pre-watching lengths to ensure the 4K file is never transcoded for any so-called 4K client, that the files contain no necessary/wanted PGS subtitles, etc.
“It is like going to the doctor because your head hurts from banging it into the wall. When the doctor says stop doing that, you continue to do it anyway.”
In the early days of football, there were many head injuries and broken bones. People were told “don’t play football.” That was one option. Another option was helmets and pads. Plex needs to provide a helmet and pads here. Banging your head on the wall is a dumb endeavor. Playing football takes skill and when well executed results in an aesthetic sort of beauty. You may not be a football guy in order to grasp the analogy; if not, apologies.
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