What on earth is going on with all the people that talk about “things you SHOULD be doing instead of transcoding from HDR” instead of giving those suggestions as workarounds until HDR tone mapping is added? Seriously…so much aggressive behavior by people who have their library set up one way, expecting everyone else to do the same.
I was using free Plex on my old NAS. With my new NAS, I specifically bought one that had hardware encoding support for multiple 4K streams. And in order to use hardware encoding, I had to subscribe to Plex. No problem, I thought. So I subscribed. And then…I noticed major color banding and faded colors. So I googled to see what the problem is. I know when I play HDR content on my SDR laptop, it plays it with proper tone mapping. So there are 2 issues, really:
- Plex doesn’t do tone mapping while transcoding HDR content to SDR, which causes faded colors
- Because plex can’t transcode from 4K HDR to 1080p HDR, for example, the client itself can’t automatically do tone mapping when it’s playing HDR content on an SDR display
Why is this an issue? Well, unlike the suggestions from all the people who talk about how they make multiple copies in different resolutions for their 20-30 customers or whatever that they’re illegally selling video streaming services to, my content is for myself. And I like to access it on a variety of devices. Some HDR, some not. Some on high speed broadband, and sometimes…for example when I’m on the go…over cellular. Or I may be visiting a friend/family member and we want to watch a movie, but their internet isn’t fast enough to play the videos I have. I’m basically SOL.
As a paying subscriber, I’m allowed to express the desire for a feature that is common in many other apps. Otherwise, guess what? I have no reason to subscribe. Over 99% of my content is 4K HDR. And I’m not going to waste the time or space to make another set of videos in lower resolutions. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t need to subscribe to Plex Pass. So if the Plex solution is to go out of my way to get it working without utilizing the feature that I’m paying Plex for, then I wouldn’t pay Plex. And I don’t think that’s the company line.
Note: IT IS PERFECTLY REASONABLE AND ACCEPTABLE TO ASK WHY A SERVICE YOU’RE PAYING FOR DOESN’T HAVE A CERTAIN FEATURE THAT YOU WOULD OTHERWISE EXPECT IT TO HAVE.
It is also ACCEPTABLE to give suggestions to people, telling them how they can go about watching their content by working around this limitation.
It is NOT ACCEPTABLE to say the feature doesn’t need to exist because of an arbitrary reason and because you don’t need it. You’re one user. You may not need it. I do. Others here do as well.
Plex DOES need to address this limitation. If this were resolved, it would benefit us all. By you saying it’s an unnecessary feature, you’re creating the impression that it’s not a universally beneficial feature, and lowering it on the To-Do list of features. So you’re really not helping anybody, and you’re just being a jerk.
White knighting for a company that works for profit is one of the silliest things people can do. The company doesn’t care about me, and they don’t care about you. You get nothing by defending them. You only take away from others. And if you get joy in doing that, then God help you.
edit: Forgot to add…thumbnails generated for HDR videos is also washed out. So even if I am streaming in original 4K HDR quality, the thumbnails over the seek bar are washed out due to lack of tone mapping.
That’s my problem.
