Iphone 12 Dolby Vision Playback

Plex Players Player Betas
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Wow, I’ve never really looked in these forums before. I hope this isn’t too out of place to post this here, but I thought I might share my experience on my hardware. I am a Lifetime Plex Pass account holder so I believe all options should be enabled.

I thought I had something going with my LG C9 playing back my iPhone 12 DV videos and actually pulling the DV flag on the LG. I forget how tough it is for the LG or my Xbox One X to actually playback 4k though. It buffers constantly and the Xbox stutters during playback.

I noticed a FAQ on here that goes deep on how tough 4k playback is over the network. It surprises me that neither of these devices has the grunt to play these back smoothly. They should both be more than adequate?

I’m not transcoding. I have tried to dictate Direct Play in the settings for the player apps, but I believe it defaulted to that anyway.

Direct Stream pulls a HLG HDR flag on the LG too btw. The Xbox One X will not give me any love for DV at all. I may need to check to see if it is using the beta app or if I turned it back to the standard app. Direct Play gives me DV on the LG and it looks stunning! If only the buffering could be fixed.

I forget that some of you guys are ripping 4k discs and you know way more about all of this than I do. I do rip my 1080p Bluray discs for Plex, but I don’t even have a 4k capable desktop machine player. So, I’m not in the game of that yet.

I am using wireless and maybe that’s the bottleneck, but while monitoring my router control panel it doesn’t appear to be taxed. These are 50mbps (?) files - not some 100mbps 4k disc files. I can’t believe my router is the bottleneck, but I did get a quick lesson from that FAQ on how many ways it can go wrong.

Any tips/suggestions welcome. I’ll try to look through these forums for answers, but honestly this gets out of my depth quickly. Looks like the short answer is that 4k is just extremely difficult to playback over the network.

My desktop is an old i7-2600k 3.4ghz and I’ve got a Nvidia GTX 1050ti. It’s been kicking out 1080p pretty well most recently. 4k might just be too much for some weak link in the chain.

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I noticed last night that my iPhone will stream these files back to me flawlessly from my Plex server.

I also noticed today that I was not using the preview app on the Xbox One X. It plays much smoother with the preview app. Still no Dolby Vision banner triggered on the LG C9, but it looks like it is playing it back in HDR. I don’t get an actual HDR banner either though.

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Here are couple of things with DV and DV shot on iPhone.

Not all DV is created equal. Let’s get that out of the way first. There are different profiles for different sources. Streaming uses profile 5. UHD discs use profile 7. iPhone uses 8 based on HLG (hence why it falls back to HLG if it somehow can’t trigger DV for one reason or another). So the client has to support the profile in order to properly play DV file. I don’t own Xbox but it probably doesn’t support profile 8 if it doesn’t trigger DV.

Haven’t tried it on LG internet app. Or Plex on LG since I don’t daily drive either. So I can’t say much about that. But the stutter may be due to network. How good is your wifi?

With a good wifi connection, good wifi performance on the client device, you can direct play 4K over the network just fine. I can stream 4K remux with very high bitrate to my Shield on wifi connection. I’ve tried similar with my LG but LG couldn’t do it. Probably a subpar wifi performance on the TV itself. Obviously would be more reliable if wired.

LG (or any other TV for that matter) only has 100mbps ethernet port. But it should be enough to stream 55mbps file iPhone shoots. If possible, try with wired connection. If you can stream flawlessly with wire, you have your answer for the stutter. If not, the bottleneck may be elsewhere.