Plex displays wrong colours with Dolby Vision on AppleTV 4k

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Thanks for your effort.

Not sure what your employer thinks what ppl are supposed to do here. Wait an indefinite amount of time? Buy another subscription form infuse? Buy another streaming device?
What does the team manager propose his users do now?

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I’m guessing the below:

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Another month, another update, still no fix…

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Come on…

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Can we please please sort this out? Been a lifetime pass member for so long and it sucks investing in something just to use a competitor app to get the job done.

Thanks Infuse for the solution for now tho!

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It’s ridiculous. The silence is deafening.

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I’m hoping that means you’ve straightened out expectations, but just so we’re all clear:

  • Plex should support Dolby Vision Profile 5 (dvhe.05) at various levels, generally 5 thru 7 (dvhe.05.05, dvhe.05.06, dvhe.05.07).
  • The reason dvhe.05 content is showing incorrect colors when played back in Plex today is because the profile uses Dolby’s ICpCt/IPT color space instead of BT.2020 used in HDR10. So there’s no fallback to HDR10 that displays correctly.
  • There’s no expectation that Plex support Profile 7 (dvhe.07) until such point it’s possible to support it in software or hardware, as the Apple TV 4K (2017/2021) doesn’t support it.
  • The reason your dvhe.07 files were appearing correctly in your testing is because the Base Layer (BL) is HDR10-compatible, meaning dvhe.07 uses the same BT.2020 color space as HDR10 and contains the same static metadata. So Plex and the Apple TV are falling back to HDR10 playback with those files, ignoring the Full Enhancement Layer (FEL, a second 1080p video stream that adds additional video information to support full 12-bit color, plus the DoVi dynamic metadata (RPU)) or the Minimal Enhancement Layer (MEL, a second stream with no video information that carries just the RPU).
  • There’s no expectation that Plex support Profile 8 (dvhe.08) until such point it’s possible to support it in software or hardware, as the Apple TV 4K (2017/2021) doesn’t appear to support it. While Profile 8.1 is HDR10-compatible because the video stream uses the same PQ transfer function and BT.2020 color space (and the RPU is just ignored when falling back to HDR10), Profile 8.4 uses HLG, so it’s a totally different story. It’s possible Profile 8.4 is or will be supported on the ATV4K at some point with a software update because the iPhone 12 Pro uses 8.4, but it doesn’t appear playback is supported on the ATV4K today.
  • The ATV4K 2021 model does add explicit support for HLG and 2160p60 HDR playback, which are not included in the supported playback modes for the ATV4K 2017 model. So it’s possible there may be a difference in what Plex can support across the different generations of the ATV4K specifically for 4K HDR @ 60fps playback, HLG playback, and therefore DoVi Profile 8.4 support. Even if Profile 8.4 isn’t supported, the A12 Bionic SoC in the ATV4K 2021 model should support HLG playback today, falling back to static metadata for HDR if the Profile 8.4 RPU can’t be processed.

This post at AV Discourse has a good overview on demystifying DoVi profiles & levels.

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Wow, great summary!

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Where do you give gold on this website

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I am having the same issue. I short video in Dolby vision on my iPhone 12 Pro Max, and Plex in Apple TV 4K is blowing out the colors unless I force it to convert/transcode automatically to standard color mode. Yet when I Airplay this same content from my iPhone to Apple TV 4K it displays in Dolby vision. LG OLED. Please fix ! :slight_smile:

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Hey, it’s us again.

We know this is not your responsibility and we do appreciate your effort but can you please ask the team-lead of the aTV dev team to make a statement, either here or to you with some concrete information, a plan moving forward and a tentative timeline.
“We are aware of the issue” is not enough.
The communication strategy of your employer could need some rethinking, this is really really really not inspiring confidence. Not a good look.

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Let’s not let this die

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Agreed. With how common Dolby Vision is now it’s leaning towards being a necessity in day-to-day performance.

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What bugs me the most is knowing that the hardware is capable of it.

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I think people might be confusing multiple different issues here. Content using Profile 7 (the Blu-Ray profile) should display fine, but content using Profile 5 (sometimes used in web streaming) will not. When +1ing this, please make sure to include a sample file, and note which profile it is.

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It was me who poked Elan on Twitter about this issue to try and get something moving. However, I’m not up on the technicalities, so I have asked Nekno to respond. All I know is that the problem files on Plex play fine on Infuse, so it’s not a hardware issue, but rather a player issue.

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Oh! Can Plex on AppleTV correctly display files with DV Profile 7? I thought the AppleTV was only supporting Profile 5.

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I think it’s because the profile 7 base layer is HDR10-compatible as nekno explained above:

So the AppleTV can’t play Dolby Vision from profile 7, but it will play HDR10 from profile 7.

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Ah yes, I see. So in this case it’s actually displaying HDR10, not Dolby Vision. So like I thought, DV profile 7 isn’t possible with the Apple TV, but it will correctly fallback to HDR10.

So the only Dolby Vision fully supported by the AppleTV is Profile 5, which right now is broken when using the Plex player.

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Sometimes broken, yes