Jellyfin Dolby Vision and HDR - which clients support it (2026)

Specs, settings and source code below were checked in September 2026, against Jellyfin 12. Device support lists change often; check the linked manufacturer page before relying on a detail.

TL;DR

• Dolby Vision adds a dynamic metadata layer on top of an HDR base image. Profile 5 has no fallback layer; profiles 7 and 8 add a base layer a non-Dolby-Vision device can fall back to.
• HDR10 is a static-metadata standard from the Consumer Technology Association. HDR10+ (Samsung, 20th Century Fox and Panasonic) and Dolby Vision both add dynamic, scene-by-scene metadata on top of that idea. HLG, standardized by the ITU, needs no metadata at all.
• A device that cannot decode Dolby Vision's dynamic layer falls back to the HDR10 or HLG base layer when the file has one, or shows visibly wrong colors, often a green or pink/purple tint, when it does not.
• Apple TV, Nvidia Shield TV and several Fire TV Stick 4K models play Dolby Vision natively. Samsung TVs do not support it and use HDR10+ instead. PC and browser support is far more limited than on TV hardware.
• Jellyfin can tone-map HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision profiles 5 and 8 down to SDR on the server, with the hardware requirements below, but only downward, never into a different HDR format.
• Swiftly Player plays Dolby Vision files through VLC, server sends the original file, no transcode. Released VLC and VLCKit builds render the HDR10-compatible base layer and do not apply Dolby Vision's dynamic metadata; more on that below.

Dolby Vision profiles, plainly

Dolby's own profile documentation describes a profile as a combination of "video codec and codec profile specifications," a "single or dual-layer video stream configuration," and "cross-compatibility options including SDR, HDR10, or HLG" (Dolby, "What is Dolby Vision Profile"). Dolby's public site does not publish one table with every profile's technical detail, since the full specification is restricted to licensees, but its own encoding guidance covers the profiles readers actually run into:

• Profile 5: a single video layer with no fallback layer at all, meant "if you want to review the encode on Dolby Vision devices, only" (Dolby, DaVinci Resolve encoding FAQ). It stores color in a proprietary format instead of a standard one, which is why a device that ignores the Dolby Vision layer has nothing sensible to fall back to. Mostly used for streaming.
• Profile 7: a dual-layer format, base layer plus enhancement layer plus dynamic metadata (RPU), most often found on Ultra HD Blu-ray remuxes. Dolby's own transport-stream documentation describes a "Primary Dolby Vision PID" carrying the base layer and a "Secondary Dolby Vision PID" carrying the "EL and/or RPU substream" (Dolby, transport-stream spec). A player reading only the base layer still shows a compliant HDR picture; only a full decoder combines both.
• Profile 8: single layer, like profile 5, but with a base layer cross-compatible with SDR, HDR10 or HLG. Profile 8.1 targets "cross compatibility to HDR10 devices." Profile 8.4 does the same for HLG and is, in Dolby's own words, "the 'social media' profile," used on platforms such as Vimeo and Bilibili, because its encodes carry "a cross-compatible HLG base layer, so that if a device does not support Dolby Vision decoding, it can often decode just the HLG base layer" (Dolby, video-sharing FAQ). A third variant, 8.2, is widely described elsewhere as using an SDR base layer, but we could not confirm that on Dolby's own site, so treat it as unverified.

HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG

• HDR10 is defined by the Consumer Technology Association: 10-bit color, the SMPTE ST 2084 (PQ) transfer curve, BT.2020 color primaries, and static metadata under SMPTE ST 2086 plus MaxFALL and MaxCLL values (CTA, video technology definitions). "Static" means one set of brightness values for the entire title, not scene by scene.
• HDR10+ adds dynamic metadata on top of the same idea: "scene-by-scene or frame-by-frame instructions for brightness, contrast, and color," on a royalty-free basis (hdr10plus.org). Samsung, 20th Century Fox and Panasonic formally established HDR10+ Technologies LLC in 2018, after Samsung and Amazon Video jointly announced the format the year before as its first streaming partner.
• HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) is standardized by the ITU alongside PQ, in Recommendation BT.2100, "for use in production and international programme exchange" (ITU-R BT.2100-3). Unlike HDR10 or Dolby Vision, HLG carries no separate metadata track; it is commonly credited to the BBC and NHK, developed for live broadcast, where metadata that could desync mid-broadcast is a real problem.

What happens when a client cannot handle the format

Dual-layer and backward-compatible profiles (7 and 8) generally have somewhere to fall back to. TRaSH Guides, a widely used self-hosting reference, describes profile 7 content as playing correctly on capable hardware such as an Nvidia Shield Pro, "but on most other players will revert to the HDR10 fallback" (TRaSH Guides); that works because a non-Dolby-Vision decoder can still read the base layer as ordinary HDR10 or HLG and ignore the enhancement data it does not understand.

Profile 5 has nowhere to fall back to, since it never had a compatible base layer. When a player without proper profile 5 support tries anyway, the picture often comes out visibly wrong, commonly a green or pink/purple tint rather than natural color. The same symptom shows up independently across projects: an mpv issue describes "false colors" with a "purple-green tint" on profile 5 content next to correctly rendered profile 8.1 content in the same report (mpv issue #10700); a Kodi issue reports profile 5 files playing with "lots of green and pink" (Kodi issue #26608); and TRaSH Guides describes the same class of file showing "blown out pinks and greens" on incompatible devices. The common thread: profile 5 stores picture data in Dolby's own color format, so a decoder not built to reverse that mapping renders the raw values as if they were ordinary HDR10.

On the server side, Jellyfin decides whether a file needs converting by comparing its HDR type against what the client's device profile declares. The mechanism comes from a pull request that added VideoRangeType to Jellyfin's stream-selection conditions: the server "will follow the condition from clients to make a right decision between using Transcoding, DirectPlay, DirectStreaming or Remuxing." If a client never lists Dolby Vision or a specific HDR type as supported, that file transcodes, and per Jellyfin's codec support docs, "any HDR content will have to be converted to SDR by the server for proper playback on these clients." This corner of Jellyfin still has open edge cases as of 2026, per user-reported issues about a profile 7 file that stopped falling back to HDR10 correctly after an update (jellyfin-androidtv#5073) and files combining Dolby Vision with HDR10+ transcoding to SDR instead of falling back to plain HDR10 (jellyfin#16687) — bug reports, not documented behavior, but a sign that fallback logic is still being refined.

Jellyfin's tone-mapping settings

Tone mapping lives under Dashboard > Playback > Transcoding, described in Jellyfin's own source as a way to "transform the dynamic range of a video from HDR to SDR while maintaining image details and colors" (jellyfin-web strings). The controls, from the same source and from Jellyfin's EncodingOptions:

• Enable Tone mapping — the on/off switch, off by default.
• Tone mapping algorithm — bt2390 by default, with none, clip, linear, gamma, reinhard, hable and mobius also available.
• Tone mapping mode — auto, max, rgb, lum or itp.
• Tone mapping range — auto, tv or pc.
• Tone mapping peak, desat and param — numeric fine-tuning values, 100, 0 and 0 by default.
• A separate VPP tonemapping toggle for the hardware-accelerated path on Intel.

Dolby Vision profiles 5 and 8 specifically can be tone-mapped this way since Jellyfin 10.8, provided the server runs jellyfin-ffmpeg 5.0.1-5 or newer (Jellyfin, hardware acceleration overview). This is always a conversion down to SDR, never to a different HDR format, and it only happens during a transcode; a file that Direct Plays keeps its original Dolby Vision or HDR data untouched.

Hardware requirements follow the same generational floors as any HEVC 10-bit decode, per Jellyfin's own per-vendor guides, since tone mapping needs the GPU to decode the 10-bit source first:

• Intel: HEVC 10-bit decode from Kaby Lake (7th generation Core) onward; Dolby Vision also needs Prefer OS native DXVA or VA-API hardware decoders checked (Intel guide).
• Nvidia: HEVC 10-bit decode from the GM206 variant of Maxwell 2nd generation onward; Dolby Vision needs Enable enhanced NVDEC decoder checked, plus a driver of at least 522.25 on Windows or 520.56.06 on Linux for Jellyfin 10.11 (Nvidia guide).
• AMD: HEVC 10-bit decode from the Polaris generation (RX 400 series) onward, via either the OpenCL or Vulkan path; both support Dolby Vision profile 5 (AMD guide). The Vulkan path runs on libplacebo, which also turns up in Dolby Vision's history on VLC, below.
• Rockchip RKMPP, on some ARM boards, gained Dolby Vision tone-mapping in Jellyfin 10.11, limited to the RK3588/RK3588S chips.

Our hardware acceleration guide covers setting up each path from a bare Docker container to the dashboard toggle. If every client you use already plays HDR and Dolby Vision on its own, this whole topic is moot: tone mapping only runs when a transcode was already going to happen, most often for the VideoRangeTypeNotSupported reason covered in our transcoding causes article.

Device and client support

Rows marked "not confirmed" or "not documented" mean no manufacturer statement was found either way, not that the feature is confirmed absent. Amazon's own comparison table lists several older Fire TV Sticks with no HDR support at all, so "Fire TV" alone is not a useful shorthand; the exact model matters more than the brand.

Why VLC-based clients handle Dolby Vision this way

VLC's own maintainers have been direct about the constraint on Apple platforms. Answering a Dolby Vision feature request on VLCKit's own tracker, maintainer Felix Paul Kühne wrote that "Apple decided not to offer the Dolby Atmos codec to third party apps [...] while still including it on all current devices and providing it to apps using AVPlayer. Same is true for Dolby Vision. [...] I don't see VLC supporting either format anytime soon" (VLCKit issue #530). A separate issue confirms the same gap for HDR output more broadly: "VLC 3 plays HDR content tone-mapped to SDR. Both 3.x and 4.x for macOS currently do not support 'native' HDR output on HDR screens" (VLC issue #18618).

Genuine Dolby Vision metadata handling does exist in VLC's source history: an optional rendering library VLC can use, libplacebo, merged support for reading Dolby Vision's dynamic metadata for profiles 5 and 8.x in December 2021, and VLC's own code gained the parsing to feed it in October 2022, targeting the unreleased VLC 4.0 (libplacebo merge request, VLC merge request). VLC's current stable release is still version 3.0.24, so that work has not shipped. It also does not carry over cleanly to Apple platforms: a newer, Metal-based renderer for macOS, iOS and tvOS replaces the OpenGL path the Dolby Vision code depends on, described in its own merge request as handling "HDR tone-mapping natively [...] backed by Metal" rather than through libplacebo (VLC merge request #3436). On Android, a still-open bug describes a real profile 5 file playing with "everything become more violet-ish" on VLC for Android 3.6.0 (vlc-android issue #3069), and VLC's own desktop feature request for Dolby Vision remains open after nine years (VLC issue #18813).

Put together: released VLC and VLCKit builds, on every platform checked, decode the underlying HEVC stream and display it as an HDR10 or SDR image rather than applying Dolby Vision's frame-by-frame metadata. That is neither full support nor an outright failure; it is the same base-layer fallback a non-Dolby-Vision TV uses with a profile 7 or 8 file. Swiftly Player, and any other client built on the same released VLC engine, shares this position rather than facing a limitation of its own.

FAQ

Summary

Profile 5 has no fallback layer, profiles 7 and 8 do, and whether a device shows a correct picture, a base-layer fallback or visibly wrong colors depends on which of those it gets and whether it understands it. Apple TV, current Fire TV Stick 4K models and Nvidia Shield TV play Dolby Vision natively; Samsung does not support it; PC playback through Kodi or Jellyfin Desktop is the least documented corner of the ecosystem. Jellyfin can tone-map Dolby Vision and other HDR formats down to SDR on the server, with hardware requirements that mirror ordinary HEVC 10-bit decode, but only downward and only during a transcode. VLC-based clients, Swiftly Player included, currently render the HDR10-compatible base layer rather than Dolby Vision's dynamic metadata, a limitation of the shared engine rather than any single app.