My blu-ray backup is playing fine on the smart tv’s media player and on my desktop PC (albeit as HDR10, not DV on both) but when played through Plex it crops the top and bottom leading to an extreme letterbox that’s cropping out the image from the film’s 21:9 aspect ratio. This is the only time I have experienced it, all my other files playback fine. Wondering if anyone else has experienced it.
Codec HEVC
Bitrate 33635 kbps
Language English
Language Tag en
D O V I B L Compat I D 6
D O V I B L Present true
D O V I Level 6
D O V I Present true
D O V I Profile 8
D O V I R P U Present true
D O V I Version 1.0
Bit Depth 10
Chroma Location topleft
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Coded Height 1600
Coded Width 3840
Color Primaries bt2020
Color Range tv
Color Space bt2020nc
Color Trc smpte2084
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Height 1600
Level 5.1
Original true
Profile main 10
Ref Frames 1
Title American Psycho (2000)
Width 3840
Display Title 4K DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)
No sorry I meant during playback there is a “Display Mode” setting under playback settings. It has the following selections “Letterbox, Original, Strech, Zoom” if you try the different options does it make a difference?
Would you also be able to provide your Android TV logs? You can click on this link in order to see how to get them.
My bad. I checked the playback settings and it was set as Letterbox. I cycled through all the options but they were worse than Letterbox. I took pictures of the TV with the different selections, attaching them for reference. Also attaching a picture of playback on the TV’s native media player.
So the stretched and zoom ones were completely wrong as they were distorted. The letterbox one’s correct in the sense that it isn’t stretched/distorted. But the original issue of the image getting cropped is there.
I have removed the extra screenshots from the different playback settings from the post above so it doesn’t get confusing. Now it’s just two: Plex in letterbox mode and the TV’s built-in media player. The TV’s media player has the correct 21:9 letterbox without any cropping. I wasn’t able to match the exact frames for the pictures but the camera is fixed in this scene with just the actors moving and talking. You can notice the cropping if you look at the background, e.g. the office windows and the desk.
I see what you mean, I have a similar file and a TCL C845 but it’s not doing that. Update: I was able to reproduce with the title you are using. We will investigate and get back to you. Thanks for the extra information.
So I have some feedback but not sure you will like it much.
So first thing is that even though your TV supports 4K its internal OS does not display in 4K, a few manufacturers do this and TCL is one of them, my C845 does it as well. This is why when you set Plex to “original” display mode it is zoomed in because the player is downscaling the image to fit 1080p. This can be seen by the following lines in your log file when you have refresh rate or resolution switching enabled.
09-13 14:55:44.779 i: [MediaDecisionMediaSource] Using ProgressiveMediaSource with FFmpegExtractor.
09-13 14:55:44.780 i: [MediaDecisionMediaSource] onMediaDecisionRefreshed (Sources: 1)
09-13 14:55:44.781 i: [DisplayBehaviour] Mode found: 1920x1080 @ 60.0000Hz (1) (Score: 100.00 (RR: 100.00 R: 0.00)
09-13 14:55:44.782 i: [DisplayBehaviour] Mode found: 1920x1080 @ 50.0000Hz (2) (Score: 0.00 (RR: 0.00 R: 0.00)
09-13 14:55:44.782 i: [DisplayBehaviour] Best mode for 3840x1600 @ 60.000004Hz selected as 1920x1080 @ 60.0000Hz (1).
09-13 14:55:44.798 i: [DisplayBehaviour] Current Mode ID: 1 / {id=1, width=1920, height=1080, fps=60.000004}
09-13 14:55:44.803 i: [DisplayBehaviour] Mode is already set to our best mode of 1920x1080 @ 60.0000Hz (1).
The only way to get native 4k on your TV is to actually use an external device.
Then onto the file being cropped as it is not displaying in 4K and needs to downscale this is handled by the device decoder, and this should usually not be a problem however, the file is using DoVi which uses a different decoder than that of regular HDR or SDR content, and there seems to be a problem with the actual decoder. I verified this on a few other apps other than Plex. We created a custom build which entirely disabled DoVi so that the file would playback as HDR10 and it then displays correctly with no cropping. As for your internal media player on your TV playing fine, I am going to assume it was using HDR10 instead of DoVi, this happened for me when I used casting to play the file in the media player app.
Unfortunately, we can’t release a build that has DoVi disabled as it’s not an issue on all DoVi content. We are going to be adding a setting on Android that will allow you to disable DoVi manually which would then fix the cropping but I can’t give you a time frame on when it will be available.
Thank you for the detailed investigation, I really appreciate the feedback. I have been mulling over getting an Apple TV 4K and you have helped me make the decision.
For what it’s worth, DoVi Profile 5 (single-layer) plays fine without any cropping.
Now I could be wrong about this but I swear before I flashed the Google TV firmware on my C825 this issue wasn’t there on the Android TV firmware. I remember watching another movie in the same DoVi profile in Plex without any cropping but now when I play that same file there is cropping in that one too. Again, maybe my memory isn’t serving me well because it was a year or two ago. In any event, it has nothing to do with Plex.
Yes, it’s not really that every DoVi title will have the issue, I have a profile 8 title I used for testing that has a similar aspect ratio and resolution and there is no cropping so I think it will differ between titles.
Oh so the C825 originally came with Android TV and not Google TV? It may be possible that something did change after a firmware upgrade, I would like to know why they only display the internal OS at 1080p, most of the time you won’t even know it’s 1080p unless you check the logs or an app tells you.
