Tip!: HDR to SDR tone mapping support is currently available as a Plex Pass preview and requires an active Plex Pass subscription for the main Plex Media Server account.
This feature allows Plex Media Server to maintain high visual fidelity of content, by applying tone mapping to convert it to SDR when transcoding HDR content.
Requirements
This feature requires Plex Media Server v1.21.0 or newer. The following platform support is currently available:
| Platform | Software (CPU) | Hardware (Intel) | Hardware (NVIDIA) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | • | PARTIAL (reduced performance) | |
| macOS | • | N/A | |
| Linux | • | • | • |
| FreeBSD | • | ||
| Docker | • | • | When CUDA available in the container |
| NAS | • | When beignet and OpenCL available | When driver available |
| NVIDIA SHIELD | • | N/A |
Note: If using Plex Media Server on Unraid with Docker, and you wish to use NVIDIA hardware transcoding and tone mapping, you will need to be running Unraid OS version 6.9.0 beta 35 or newer, and have Nvidia GPU configured for your Plex Docker container.
Plex Media Servers using Intel Coffee Lake or newer processors on Ubuntu require version 20.04 or later.
Tip!: Hardware-accelerated streaming is a premium feature and requires an active Plex Pass subscription.
This feature supports all video produced in HDR10, or in other formats that are backwards-compatible with HDR10 (including HDR10+ and most Dolby Vision content).
It’s worth noting that most HDR content will be in 4K resolution. If your platform has to use software transcoding to perform the tone mapping, then it may well struggle convert 4K content in real-time, unless you’re running on a very powerful system.
Related Page: Using Hardware-Accelerated Streaming
Dependencies
On some platforms, it may be necessary to install additional drivers and libraries before this feature can be used.
On Linux and FreeBSD systems using Intel GPUs for hardware acceleration, the “libOpenCL” library and “Beignet” GPU driver are required. For instance, on Ubuntu or Debian systems, you would need to run the following command to install these dependencies:
sudo apt install ocl-icd-libopencl1 beignet-opencl-icdNote: If the necessary drivers and libraries cannot be detected or are not available, then software-based (CPU-based) tone mapping will be used with hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding (if enabled). This may degrade performance.
Limitations
Transcodes that involve burnt-in subtitles may require more CPU resources, which could reduce performance.
Investigating Issues with Tone Mapping
First, keep in mind that real-time tone mapping will not be as good as professionally produced and color graded content. Still, you can expect that Plex’s tone mapping support should generally be able to produce good color mapping and help avoid the “washed out” colors that occur when converting HDR content without tone mapping.
If you do run into what you think is a legitimate issue with the tone mapping functionality, please help us investigate this. To do so:
- Post specific details in the appropriate Plex Media Server forum
- In the forum topic, attach full server logs of a single problematic playback attempt
- In the topic, also link to a small sample file that can be used to reproduce the issue
Related Page: Reporting issues with Plex Media Server
Related Page: Generating Sample Files from Media
If you encounter issues and need to temporarily disable the tone mapping, you can do so using the Enable HDR tone mapping preference in the transcoder settings page for your Plex Media Server. You can find it under Settings > Server > Transcoder in the Plex Web App.
Related Page: Transcoder
