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?
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.