@Burt_Macklin & all following,
The reason we’re separating the transcoder (core) upgrade from the ICR and IMD updates is because ICR & IMD alone caused breakage with older platforms every time we’ve updated them in the past.
We’re keeping them separate in an attempt to create the known-stable FFMPEG base before we tackle the ICR & IMD update to add support for the newer GPUs
@brainslayer thanks for pointing this out, I’ve filed an issue with the build team to distribute the ffmpeg source with test builds as well as official builds.
thanks.
All,
I’ve cut a couple file samples which reportedly cause artifacts.
I would greatly appreciate everyone with artifact problems to try these two files.
Compare them to your files.
When you find artifacting, screen capture it and highlight it with a graphics editor, tell me the CPU/GPU make & model. ( and driver version if Nvidia)
Thanks.
Seems like only 2 issues to go until it’s ready to be released in a beta channel, correct?
Lots of work behind the scenes right now.
Give us a bit please.
FYI: When in beta channel, the issues will blossom 
Any reason Plex won’t pay for the licenses to Decode and Encode Dolby Vision?
I don’t have all of the details here, but these things usually boil down to cost and licensing concerns (esp if we had to deploy the licenses on every PMS instance which I don’t know if we would have to do or not, but license management overhead for something like this would be pretty tough to do).
The easier answer for me to give here is that this isn’t something we are working on or have plans to do in the near future.
Thanks, I’d love for plex to offer this if it was on a per user basis… I and many user would pay for this feature even if just for that user/server
Sorry to off topic but do you require a license for playback for your playback backend on the client or does that then tie down to the device itself?
There was a response from a Plex employee on this topic a while ago but I can’t find the thread. Essentially the licence fee required from Dolby is insanely expensive (many thousands of dollars per Plex server expensive).
@McWanke - Here’s a thought…
If the concerns are the cost of the licence, then why not simply offer this as a paid for bolt on.
That way Plex can either decide to get the bolt on revenue from the customer to cover the cost of the licence, or even add a few bucks on top to make a little profit at the same time.
Software houses offer this kind of thing all the time…
MS for example, offer an “Online Archiving” bolt on licence within O365… If your current primary subscription doesn’t include that feature, buy a bolt on licence…
You could also end up having a tiered licencing scheme that starts with the basics and goes all the way up to the bells and whistles…
There’s always a way…
@kesawi - Surely that cannot be right?? Many thousands per server?
To me that sounds unsustainable…
It’s highly unlikely that Dolby will want to charge many thousands per TV that supports DV, or per BluRay player, or per Roku stick.
That just can’t be right!
I believe the numbers quoted come from Dolby‘s own homepage, which speaks of $1000. Though, they don’t mention if that’s a monthly, yearly… fee, if there’s any price tiers…
I personally have no idea how this applies to a Plex setup.
https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/General-Dolby-Vision-FAQs?language=en_US#howmuch
You’re conflating playback with mastering, which are two separate things and licence structures.
TVs, BluRau players, Roku sticks are playback devices and just play back the DV stream received. The royalty for these devices is around $2-3 per unit (based on a ChatGPT search).
A PMS transcoding a stream involving Dolby Vision is considered to be a content creator which is covered by a separate licence that is around $2500 per year for mastering (based on a ChatGPT search). These are generally commercial operations so Dolby likes to extract its pound of flesh from them.
There’s no incentive for Dolby to create a cheap licence for home users.
@kesawi is correct. The decode side of things is likely cheep, it would be the re-encode side that is costly. Additionally, if the audio liscence is any indicator we wouldnt be able to use the functionality built into ffmpeg, we’d have to hack an interface between ffmpeg and their application.
Also I suspect a complicating factor is that there is currently no (legal) way for a consumer to acquire Profile 5 DolbyVision personal content, and Profile 7 backed up from Bluray media includes a HDR10 fallback layer, so the need for DV decode there is less. For all we know, Dolby may not be willing to license DoVi P5 encode/decode for personal use.
I think it’s also incompatible with the way they’ve marketed Dolby Vision. It’s supposed to preserve the director’s vision, provide end-to-end color-space management, have hand-tuned scene-by-scene highlights, etc. Hard to say all that and then let any random middlebox do transformations.
To add to this, Dolby also requires certification of systems that are outputting Dolby Vision content. I work in the TV Production industry, and it was a costly process to get an approved Color Edit Bay built out to their spec, and they need to re-certify the bay annually to ensure their quality levels are met.
It doesn’t surprise me that Dolby would not be on board with the idea of allowing creation/transcode of DV media.
Is the transcoder upgrade preview going to be updated to address the potential security issue so that we can continue to test it without a potential risk?
Yes, it is building as we speak. Will likely post tomorrow, monday at the latest.
