I have been using Plex for awhile and I’m always impressed with the fact that if I have an issue, before I need to speak up a new version of PMS is ready that remedies my problem. Plex is awesome.
Anyway, onto my “problem”. I recently purchased a 4K HDR TV (and a Roku Ultra). I have quite a large library of 1080p content and I didn’t want to replace any of my 1080p content with 4K content of the same title before I knew everything was working as expected. I created a new library called “4K Movies” and loaded some 2160p BT2020 content to this library. Now I have two copies of the same title although they are in different folders (directories) and different libraries.
When I begin to play the 4K BT2020 content the 1080p content with the same title appears on my “On Deck” screen.
I understand that this is probably functioning as designed but I wanted to know is there a way to stop this behavior?
I’m worried that my PMS is doing double the work. Also, I have noticed that if I try to play the 4K BT2020 content on a 1080p set (ATV4 or Roku 3) the colors look awful. It is for that reason that I would like to maintain two copies of my media and address the doubles on deck.
@josebellas said:
Now I have two copies of the same title although they are in different folders (directories) and different libraries.
When I begin to play the 4K BT2020 content the 1080p content with the same title appears on my “On Deck” screen.
Also, I have noticed that if I try to play the 4K BT2020 content on a 1080p set (ATV4 or Roku 3) the colors look awful.
To make it look right, the transcoder had to learn to transform the extended color space into the more narrow color space of conventional screens. Which is no trivial task.
To make it look right, the transcoder had to learn to transform the extended color space into the more narrow color space of conventional screens. Which is no trivial task.
I bet it isn’t and I’m definitely not complaining, I’m just making an observation. That said though trying to remap from Rec. 2020 to Re. 709 doesn’t produce a (IMO) desirable result since many of the colors are dull.
I don’t know enough about the technology so comment may not be a practical (or possible) solution but wouldn’t it be better for PMS to recognize it has two media files of the same content, one in Rec. 709, and one in Rec. 2020 and then based on the player send the correct video file?
That way a device that is HDR capable will get the expanded color space and any other device receives a stream in the HD color space?
I know it isn’t optimal from a storage perspective but it is a means to an end at providing the best quality product.
At least until the remapping from a wide color space to a narrow color space produces a result equal to or closer to that of the same content created in the narrow space. I hope that makes sense.
Oh I didn’t know. I thought it was because if I click on “get info” for any of my media files it does denote what color space the file is in so it can at the very least gather the info and present it. I’ll just wait and see what happens. For now I have my work around.
I am not 100% sure of this
But when I play HDR Videos on my Plex Media server, the TV recognises them as HDR and the video quality does appear to be HDR (I have used my TV Profile in Plex only then it was able to play these Videos). When I watch the same video via Plex on my Media centre (non HDR GPU) the quality difference is phenominal even though both are running on 4K (though GTX 970 only supports 4k @30fps but I dont think FPS would make such a difference?)
I got 2 PM Servers. On the quad core a 4k HDR video stutters and the CPU usage goes upto 99% but on the 24 core one it plays perfectly fine even though the transcoder chews up 60-65% CPU (which is a lot for a quad CPU machine)
The difference is when you ‘Direct Play’ such a file (i.e. only the client is invovled), then you can watch a HDR file.
But as soon as the Plex Transcoder comes into play, the HDR information cannot be transcoded properly ATM.
