VLC as always saves the day. Most recently for me when you want to watch HDR UHD ripped to 1080p. With plex, this becomes a problem you need to buy a plex pass for and more significantly, must have a '16 Intel CPU or newer to be able to remap it while VLC does so in the fly.

Details: In plex, the colors are so washed out it looks like a black and white movie. In VLC, the colors hit you like

Addition: I tried two remedies while packing with handbrake. BT.709 colorspace and a custom one from reddit. Both lead to the movie being so dark that you cant see most of the details.

Conclusion: VLC being open source, we should be able to see what they are doing and copy this behavior. if plex wont do it without payment, this could be huge for jellyfin for example.

Anyone with actual knowledge who can shed light on this?

    • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      When I initially set up my media server I went with Jellyfin over Plex mostly because the idea of having to create an account on an external service to use software I was hosting myself rubbed me the wrong way. Since then the more learn about Plex the more baffled I am that anyone chooses to use it at all.

  • CmdrShepard42@lemm.eeEnglish
    7·
    1 month ago

    I can’t give you much technical help, but I’m fairly certain that if you’re seeing washed out colors on an HDR rip, it means Plex isn’t actually playing in HDR and is instead transcoding it down to SDR as this is (or at least used to be) a common issue with it.

    If you check the administrator tab in a browser to see the playback information for the stream (or with something external.like Tautulli), does it show that the file is being direct played? That’s where I’d start. It could be something with the file, subtitle usage, Plex itself, the client you’re using it watch the file, or a network issue that’s causing the problem. I used to ignore HDR content entirely as I had similar issues, but with the TCL and LG TVs we have now, both using Roku, HDR content plays (locally) without issue. Remote play doesn’t work but that’s because we have atrocious upload speeds with Comcast.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 month ago

    HDR is a function of the display and display driver or GPU. It’s not the software that is doing that, it just supports hardware acceleration. Depending on your OS, the path to that handoff works differently, but as I understand it, Plex operates on software decode only unless you pay.

    Pretty much any player that supports hardware acceleration will let you have HDR if your other hardware supports it.

  • HappyTimeHarry@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    1 month ago

    Enshittification meets Plex.

    They need to limit features as a part of their business model, VLC on the other hand doesn’t.

  • five82@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Proper HDR support, both on the encoding and decoding side, has been a chore since the beginning. There’s no excuse for Plex. But in the open source community, development started slowly because most devs didn’t own anything that was capable of playing HDR.