Currently, Dolby Vision works only with Direct Play, but with the new support for HEVC transcoding and the upgrades to Plex’s FFMPEG fork, it could be possible to Direct Stream a DoVi file when the profile is supported.
For example, currently LG supports DoVi mostly through MP4 containers (Newer TVs seem to support MKV now, but that’s only for the recent ones). With the new transcoder, maybe it could be possible to automatically Direct Stream a compatible DoVi video stream from an MKV into MP4 just by copying the video, while the rest of streams could be transcoded as needed.
This way, no reencoding would be needed, and the transcoder would not handle in any way the DoVi metadata. Of course in cases where re-encoding is needed (such as subtitle burn-in or quality changes), the DoVi metadata would need to be discarded as the licenses don’t allow that
