Transcoding 4K HDR-10 content on Nvidia Shield Fails Outright

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.18.0.1913

TL;DR: Nvidia Shield running PMS cannot transcode 4K HDR-10 material?

I’ve put my first serious 4K movie on Plex this week. It’s a direct-from-disk MKV file. 4K, HDR-10, Dolby Atmos. PMS is running on the Nvidia Shield. Basically it will play fantastically well on the Shield and stream to my PC with direct-play without issue.

However - as soon as I select a transcoding option it falls apart. I recognized this as soon as I tried to stream this movie to my phone on the LAN. The Nvidia Shield and my phone both display: “Error: An error occurred while attempting to play this video. Please try restarting both the Plex Media Server and this App”. Of course I’ve tried this advice. My PC gives it its best shot without failing to an error, but displays a green garbled screen and occasionally will play a half-second of audio, but obviously it’s not working. I’ve tried changing the audio stream to narrow it down to an Atmos problem, but that doesn’t seem to be causing this. Trying to save a transcoded version to my devices for later fails outright too.

Unfortunately this means that this content is unavailable outside the LAN.

If this is a limitation of the Nvidia Shield’s transcoding hardware, I wasn’t aware of it until now, and can find no documentation on PLEX or NVIDIA forums regarding this.

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You should never transcode HDR material at all since Plex does no tone mapping and therefore colors will look washed out.

1 Like
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I noticed that too (when I was able to get it to work, still not sure how).

Anyway, I’m storing a 1080p version alongside the 4K version. Same library, sharing the metadata, I just select which version to stream when I want to watch on my phone.

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