I have a few 4K HDR movies on Plex Server, and a Xbox Series X connected to 4K SDR display monitor. When watching these movies, if I choose ‘Direct Play’ the images is dark and gray(of course they should be), so the obvious option is transcoding with HDR to SDR tone mapping. Here’s the problem, in the Quality menu, I can only choose 1080P 20Mbps, there’re no 4K 30Mbps or other 4K options, but it’s non sense playing 1080P content on 4K display monitor.
I’ve tried to identify the problem by these steps:
- Does the server support 4K to 4K transcoding? The answer is yes, I can do 4k to 4k transcoding for the same movie on an iPad Plex App, and it plays very well with right color and no lag, at the meantime the server’s CPU usage is at about 30% and GPU is 70%
- Does the movie’s bitrate is too low to transcode to 4K? The answer is no, the movie’s bitrate is 70Mbps, and on iPad app I can do 4k to 4k transcoding.
- Does Plex App on Xbox Series X support 4K movies? The answer is yes, I can direct play 4K HEVC HDR movie without any problems except the color was washed out.
So I think the problem is in the Plex App on Xbox Series X, for some reasons it decided not to show the ‘transcode to 4K 30Mbps’ menu item.
Does anybody meet the same problem? Please help me , thanks!
Here’re some screenshots/logs to help understanding the problem
Direct play an 4K HDR movie on Xbox:
there’re no 4K to 4K option on Xbox:
on an iPad I can do 4K to 4K transcoding:
and it did DO 4K to 4K transcoding with HW acceleration on:
here’s a piece of log, it shows the app on Xbox use a profile named ‘Generic’, does ‘Generic’ support transcoding to 4K? I don’t know.
Mar 08, 2022 13:16:51.288 [0x7fe123d51b38] DEBUG - [Now] Device is Xbox (XBOX).
Mar 08, 2022 13:16:51.288 [0x7fe123d51b38] DEBUG - [Now] Profile is Generic
and here’s the full log, the first transcoding event is on ‘Mar 08, 2022 12:57:05.191’ :
Archive.zip (715.3 KB)
