Switched from Infuse to Plex – Now Struggling with Dolby Vision Profile 5 (Purple Image / No Playbac

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< everyone :waving_hand:
I’ve been a long-time Infuse user and recently switched over to Plex – mainly because of metadata.
With Infuse I was always very happy with the player itself, but the metadata situation became a real headache for me (and my family) over time.
I’m using pCloud directly with Infuse, and my library is named pretty cleanly, but I constantly had to fix wrong matches and incorrect metadata. The biggest problem:
• Every Infuse account is completely isolated.
• My parents watch using their own Infuse account.
• When something was mis-matched on their side, they couldn’t fix the metadata themselves.
• I had to drive over to them every time just to correct metadata on their device.
At some point I just got tired of constantly babysitting metadata.
With Plex it’s been the complete opposite so far:
I haven’t had to manually correct a single movie or show – everything has been matched correctly right away.
My naming convention looks like this:
• Movies:
Abraham Lincoln - Vampirjäger (2012) [tmdb-72331].mkv
• TV Shows:
1923 2022 - S01E01 - 1923 [tmdb-157744].mkv
So always with the year and the [tmdb-ID] in the filename.
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The actual problem: Dolby Vision Profile 5 → purple image / won’t play
Now I’ve run into another issue and I’m hoping someone here can help.
Some of my 4K MKV files are encoded as Dolby Vision Profile 5.
Here’s a simplified example from MediaInfo:
• Container: Matroska (.mkv)
• Video: HEVC / H.265, 10-bit, 3840x2160
• HDR format:
Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 5, dvhe.05.06, BL+RPU, no metadata compression
• Color / transfer characteristics:
• Color primaries: BT.2020
• Transfer characteristics: PQ (ST 2084)
• Matrix / color space: something like IPT-PQ (Dolby Vision color space)
All of these files are MKV and behave like this in Plex:
• On my PC, those Profile 5 files play back with a purple / tinted / wrong-colored image.
• On my Apple devices (Mac, Apple TV, iPhone/iPad with the Plex app), these files often won’t play at all or fail immediately.
Other files with HDR10 or Dolby Vision Profile 7 / 8.x work perfectly fine – the problem really seems to be limited to DV Profile 5 MKVs.
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My question to you
How do you folks handle Dolby Vision Profile 5 content in Plex?
• Is there a recommended workflow to convert these files
• either to a compatible format (e.g. pure HDR10 or DV Profile 8.1)
• without noticeable quality loss?
• Are there specific tools you use (ffmpeg, dovi_tool, mp4muxer, etc.) with tried and tested settings/commands that work well for Plex + Apple clients?
• Or is there any way to make Plex / Plex clients handle these correctly without having to reprocess all affected files?
What I’m basically trying to achieve is:
1. No more purple image on my PC, and
2. Make sure these files play normally on my Apple devices via Plex.
If anyone has experience with this or a solid solution/workflow, I’d really appreciate your help. :folded_hands:
Best regards,
Marcel

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Is there a reason you didn’t use Infuse in “direct” mode? Then it uses the metadata directly from Plex and in essence just becomes a player for your Plex libraries.

Tons of people do that and it gives you the best of both worlds.

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Thanks for the suggestion! :blush: I’m aware of Infuse’s “direct” Plex mode, and on Apple devices it really is a great “best of both worlds” setup (Plex handles the library/metadata, Infuse is just the player).

In my case though, the main goal is that everything works directly in Plex, without any special workaround. My family watches on different devices/apps (not only Apple TV/iPhone), and I want one single interface/app for everyone. Otherwise I’d have to tell them “for certain movies you need to open Infuse,” and that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.

So I’m looking for a way to process the DV Profile 5 / purple-tint files so they play correctly in Plex itself, including on Apple clients. :raising_hands:

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DV is a proprietary minefield of so many different profiles. Plex doesn’t support well. I find it easier to just avoid it.

It might have a change if you repackage into an mp4 container rather than mkv.

But ultimately I recommend re-source, re-encode under more common and open formats, HDR10.

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Thank you! :folded_hands: That really helps and confirms what I’ve been seeing. I’ll go ahead and start working through the affected files step by step… 41 of them :sob::face_holding_back_tears: