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?
It sounds like you are having trouble with tonemapping HDR to SDR on the fly. This is a non-trivial task, but not impossible. Both mpv and ffmpeg (which plex and jellyfin use) are capable of this. If you install mpv, it will by default do the tonemapping, you can enable/disable this or force use of a particular algorithm if you like.
To answer your question: Plex has been pretty shitty for years now, and it’s only getting worse. They just don’t care for their user base.
ETA: Jellyfin also already does what you want, I think?
I switched from Plex to jellyfin solely for that reason
Also hw accell being free in jelly aswell
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.
Plex used to not be that way. Then they enshittified.
I have to say, Plex is a much more polished and more reliable piece of software in my experience.
I’ve used Plex for a couple of years and even got myself a lifetime premium pass when it was 65% reduced or something. But when news started popping up about them potentially leaking what content you watch i burned that bridge (look at the instance i come from, you can guess where my content stems from :D)
I then migrated over to jellyfin. It’s not as polished, it doesn’t run that reliable for me as plex did, hw accell, hdr convertion didn’t setup as easy but after a lot of tinkering it now works very fine for me.
I really enjoy jellyfin and the ecosystem that evolved around it.
You may just be talking about whichever player you’re using. Maybe try a different one.
The server is bulletproof. Plex doesn’t come close.
No i am not talking about the player as hw accell and hdr conversion runs on the server itself
The server is not bulletproof and in my experience plex ran better for me than jellyfin.
The player does have a large effect on both those things. A player that supports the codec will not need server hw accept and hdr conversion as it will direct stream. A big issues is these codecs can cost money. So if the player doesn’t come with it the player needs to pay for it, something plex may be doing for those that purchased their subscription.
Also i find that the speed of scanning, getting metadata, accuracy of linking metadata and files, the whole music section is lacking on jellyfin comparing to Plex
Still I prefer jellyfin as its free and open source and it does what I want it to do. But in my experience Plex did all of this way better, faster, more accurately and reliable… And jellyfin music category is outright unusable compared to plex
Jellyfin didn’t scan my files because they were not organized correctly
Just let me browse the damn folder
I am talking solely about the server side, not the player side.
Obviously a good functioning player will not need hw accellerated transcoding or hdr conversion. But sometimes that’s simply neither possible or feasable. Some hardware simply cannot properly transcode all formats, or don’t allow for installation of a player that can do that. Sometimes i watch a movie on my laptop while being connected to my phone mobile hotspot and using wireguard to phone home, i don’t want to direct stream a full movie in hdr and 1080p 40mbit/s… i want the server to transcode it properly.
So to conclude - i am talking about serverside, not playerside - stop assuming the person you are talking with doesn’t know what they do simply because you think you know better.
Plex is available for a lot of smart devices. Still helpful to have a server running for it in some circumstances. Not hard to spin up a Plex docker that points to the same library files. Just disable the thumbnail generation to keep it from eating drive space.
Jellyfin is awesome (I use it with my shield TV), but the reason I found plex worth paying for is their audio companion plexamp, and its integration with carplay.
I tested a ton of different apps and services, and other then plex the only good carplay experience was from online only services like spotify or similar that come with hefty subscription fees. Internet auth does suck tho.
Finamp is slowly getting there, still miles to go though…
Yes. Jellyfin is mostly awesome, now. I would recommend it to everyone.
Plex has been around a long, long time and the experience from backend to the front is still for the most part unmatched. It was really nice to have proper full featured clients on all devices. Built in skipping intros and ability to download content for offline use was really nice and would be very useful for me at this time.
I have a lifetime pass from the very beginning and was spare change compared to what they charge now. A common misconception is they took away the ability to log in locally on the lan without phoning home. You can still do that. But ultimately I decided to move on.
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.
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.
No issues with Jellyfin transcoding HDR to SDR (with tonemapping)
Enshittification meets Plex.
They need to limit features as a part of their business model, VLC on the other hand doesn’t.
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.
Me with a i5 7500…
“HDR is a chore?”
I use Firecore Infuse, never understood the hype with Plex
Never heard of that. Feel free to share info.
Plex is just really polished and kind of makes sharing with low tech friends easy imo. But switching to proper foss is on my list.
It’s not open source, unavailable on non-apple platforms, and (ironically) needs something like Plex for remote playback.
It does work with Jellyfin.
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When did I say it’s open-source? And why would it need Plex? I’ve used it with Samba, S3, WebDAV but never Plex
