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?
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.