Apologies if this has been requested before…I wasn’t able to find it.
With 4K HDR material becoming more and more prevalent, it’s causing compatibility issues with players/displays that are not HDR-capable (washed-out colors, primarily). Plex could really help bridge this transition period by having the ability to transcode from HDR to SDR. I understand that this is on the bleeding-edge, and would be a herculean task for the transcoding team…but I think it would pay huge dividends in the coming years.
I want this feature, sort of. Most PC players handle HDR to SDR tone mapping now. I don’t see why this can’t be done on the client side without transcode.
This is not a feature to be requested! This is a serious bug that needs to be addressed. Media is not being played back as expected on all devices. No idea why there isn’t more attention on this glaring issue.
It’s not a bug. Squeezing HDR content onto an SDR device is a non-trivial problem with no standard accepted solution. The tone mapping process to convert HDR to SDR is still something that is typically performed by hand by a human, not automatically.
I would welcome an attempted solution, even if it’s not real time. This would be super useful, for instance, with HDR shows. I’ll sometimes watch an episode on a non-HDR display or mobile device. Like syncing content, if Plex made some attempt to create a tone-mapped SDR version of the next few episodes and deleted them after viewing, that would be much more useful than just having to view the washed out color that I’m seeing now. But I would also be OK with creating an SDR “optimized version” for another device if I knew it would be required ahead of time.
A fairly decent tone mapping is used when direct played (as long as you use their Plex Media Player…)
Why Plex can’t just transcode the video to a smaller resolution, keep the HDR/10 bit/bt2020 color encoding intact, and apply their tone mapping to the new resolution video is beyond me.
Plex should just have an option in settings under Transcoder where you can specify what tonemapping filters you would like to use. So that everyone can tune it to their liking. The most important thing for this is that the built the transcoder with zimg, otherwise it would basically be useless.
I was testing 4k HDR10 hevc movies on my xbox displaying on a SDR 1080p cheap TV and noticed tone mapping was being implemented. Colours were not flat and looked just as vivid as same movie files in SDR.
So Plex can do tone mapping…why only in Xbox app? How come tone mapping is not implemented in Android, Chromecast and Chrome web app is beyond me.
I will have to try this out once my parity is rebuilt for my server. If true like you say, this could be nice to use the xbox for my 4k files on my non HDR 4k TV until it just becomes standard.
Impressed with the low cpu transcode on the synology 918+ I recently brought once I got the plex pass for hardware acceleration and the way it matched my media, but all this is useless unless tone mapping is built in.
It seems to be a minefield now about what route to go that will get me HDR>SDR on a standard 4k Panasonic smart tv. If I spend more money on a ATV4K then the forthcoming new version could do it but why not roll the mapping out everywhere? It looks like Atmos workarounds are still lacking on ATV but Infuse seem to have a solution - Atmos is another big requirement so I may as well scrap the plex pass and hook into the library with Infuse?!
Or do I get a shield or an x box?!
Maybe i’ve missed something, trawling through old posts but beginning to think this is all too lacking and when something does work, gets broken again. Might just have to buy Zappiti players and stick with what I know coming from a pretty solid 5 years on Dune HD.
Plex trial pass cancelled and i’ve put the money into a Zappiti Mini 4K HDR.
HDR>SDR and Atmos/DTS X all fully supported so will have no worries for a while.
Plex will need to implement a lot more features that competitors have already done or find workarounds before i review again.
I think the real answer is for them to come up with their own hardware streamer/player because each app on a smart tv, an apple tv, a shield etc has its own short comings that probably can’t be over come.
Plex crew, please consider addressing using the ffmpeg solution @smedberg posted - it should be a fairly straight-forward tweak to use that tone-mapping scheme based upon the transcode recipient’s capabilities.
Could someone from the team reply with where this is in the pipeline? It’s impacting a lot of different people with mixed displays.
The tone-mapping algorithm place 100% load on a single CPU core. Null output of our tone-mapping setup results in an average playback speed of about 4.3 frames per second on an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPU running at 3.8 GHz.
I just voted for the feature suggestion as well. I’ll be watching for updates. It’s really annoying Plex doesn’t have support for HDR to SDR conversion yet, when a lot of content is coming out in HDR format these days.
