Issue with playing Dolby content in Infuse

[S29-zg]

Hello, you mentioned that Infuse is the only Apple software capable of reliably playing Dolby Vision (DV) content. I'm curious how it achieves this—did it purchase a Dolby Vision license? Do you know its underlying implementation principle??

[cryptochrome]

It does two things:

1.) If it detects a Dolby Vision profile 7 file: It will show it as HDR, not DV, and play the HDR version, completely skipping DV

2.) If it detects Dolby Vision profile 8.1, it will just play it back natively.

Infuse have written their own playback engine, they don't use the one Apple provided (unlike Plex). Whilst Apple has added Dovi 8.1 support for their engine in tvOS 17, it's notoriously picky and inconsistent, and some players (Plex!) still don't utilize it. They will play the HDR stream inside of a DV container (e.g. your TV switches to DV, but essentially plays HDR - the Plex community calls this "Fake Dovi"). This happens regardless of the Dovi profile (it happens with 7 and 8.1).

So unless Plex (and a few others) update their code, Infuse remains the go-to player. It handles Dovi 8.1 perfectly, while properly falling back to HDR on a Dovi profile 7 file.

And if you use dovi_convert, you'll always have proper 8.1 files for Infuse (or any other player that can handle it).

Hope this makes sense.

[S29-zg]

Thank you for your reply. It seems that when playing Dolby Vision P5, Infuse calls the engine provided by Apple, while when playing P8.1, Infuse uses its own custom playback engine. When playing Dolby Vision P7, it falls back to HDR playback. I'm not sure if my understanding is correct. Also, I have a question: it appears that Infuse hasn't acquired Dolby Vision licensing. How can Infuse guarantee native playback for Dolby Vision P8.1 using its own playback engine, since this seems contradictory to not having Dolby Vision licensing?

[cryptochrome]

My understanding is that they still feed it into the Apple video engine, while making sure it can actually understand the RPU. So they don't need to license anything. But I am not sure how exactly they do it. All I can tell you is that they applied some "magic sauce" so that Dovi 8.1 is properly handled.

I am converting this to a discusion, since it's not an actual issue with my code, if you don't mind :)