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Comment by thedougd | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin/Infuse for three reasons:

1) better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad.

2) Plex, on my variety of clients, had regular issues with audio out of sync. I’m very sensitive to this and it drove me nuts. I have no issues with Jellyfin. I fiddled with all kinds of platform and Plex settings but couldn’t find a solution that solved it for good.

3) It’s easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex’s normally clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way. It’s not impossible though.

Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They’re well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.

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> better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad.

I've never really understood why it's a desirable feature to have automatic HDR-to-SDR in the first place. No one is making HDR-only content and the official SDR master for every movie and TV show done by a human is always going to beat a fancy LUT.

When performing colour grading you're always deciding what parts of the image need what amount of contrast etc. based on what's important to see in the context of the scene. When grading to HDR you're going to make different choices simply due to the fact that you have a wider dynamic range available. Even putting aside the fact that you're not starting from the same raw inputs that the production studio is working with, automatic tone-mapping is never going to be able to look at a scene in the same way that a human does and decide which parts are important and which parts aren't.

I imagine people have multiple screens but don’t want to keep multiple copies of a video?

In this case I would think people would prefer to just have the SDR version which will look good on all displays rather than the HDR version that will look better on a HDR display but will look horrible on a SDR display. It's down to personal preference of course, but I can't imagine someone caring about having HDR videos while simultaneously putting up with the bad results of automatic HDR-to-SDR.

Just as an example since I didn't include one before: Which of the two below images using different algorithms is correctly tone-mapped? Do we care more about showing the details of the car and the driver or do we care more about the rest of the scene? It's simply not possible to decide which of these is better without context, which an algorithm will never have. A human watching the scene can make that decision, or pick something completely different.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145848...

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145851...

Why are you so consistently telling other people what their preferences should be and why?

As I said already, it's down to personal preference. I just don't imagine that most people care about having the best looking video they can get on one device but don't care on another to the point where they'd sacrifice quality on device A for better quality on device B.

It’s exactly the case. Every room isn’t a home theater. We want the best quality for the home theater and “good enough” for the rest. To my surprise, others do notice the washed out effect of watching HDR content on an SDR TV, or worse the wrong colors when watching DV content on an SDR TV.

Acquiring, storing, and organizing multiple files for the same video is a hassle. Even more hassle is asking others to know which is the right one for that TV.

Nope. I personally have two HDR devices and two non-HDR ones. I don't want to keep two separate copies as this takes up more storage, requires me to get two different versions whcih means the progress won't be synced ebtweent the two, the subtitles may not be exactly the same either, etc.

I want to have one and only file that will optimally on my main device (HDR) but which also work reasonably well on a secondary non-HDR device.

Ideally Jellyfin would handle the latter two points (and I think it does), but the first two are good reasons.

On audio sync issues, I unfortunately see them with jellyfin rather frequently on apple tv when using homepods as audio output. I end up having to enable the "native player" in the experimental settings to get the audio in-sync.

I've previously reported this to the developers of the app, and they've closed the issue saying it was a bug in one of their dependencies, without fixing the issue. It remains unfixed.

Jellyfin+Infuse works really well for subtitles as well.

Infuse is a great client for any Apple device; I like it way more than plex

I love that I dont even need more software like plex or jellyfin. I just expose a smb share and point infuse to it. Usually its a windows server but using truenas atm.

Exactly, infuse plays anything thrown at it

what’s even a point of jellyfin/plex if you have access to a player like Infuse on apple devices or Nova on android

It's so awesome to be able to stream from my NAS at home my "documentary" of my last europe trip to someone in-person when I'm out at a gathering or whatever. Jellyfin + tailscale + whatever else you want to link up, is just awesome++

I still get occasional audio going out of sync, but it's usually solved by stopping and thinking the video.

Doesn't happen very often, but it's usually with older format video files.

Thinking = resuming.

Eeesh.

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