Question I need either a driver for 1080p h265 HDR video or different video player app -- not sure which ?

[CapnBillysWhizzbang]

Hope somebody can point me in the right direction--I either have a video player limitation or I'm missing a driver for a specific video format.

This desktop computer is running Windows 11 Home 64-bit, and has Nvidia GTX-1650 graphics, i5 processor with 10 cores, 2.5 GHz. The monitor is a 32-inch Samsung 3840x2160 16:9 that does HDR.

Everything is about 1 year old. I am using VLC Media Player latest version 3.0.20. This combo will play 2160p HDR video files in common file formats (primarily mkv, avi, mp4) in h265 no problem. It will play 1080p in h264 with no problem. But I get "We cannot play [filename] it uses unsupported encoding settings. " when I try to play 1080p h265 HDR content.

It is not clear about whether it's unsupported because VLC Media Player doesn't support that format or because there's a missing driver. This 1080p/HDR/h265 content plays fine on non-computer devices (Amazon FireTV Stick Max Pro running VLC media player, various SmartTVs running VLC media player, etc.), but it won't play on the computer.

 

[NanoSuit3]

Have you tried other video formatted players like Movie/TV or WindowsMedia Player? VLC is weird when it comes to Video Playbacks so see if it'll work on something else besides it......................................

 

[dwd999]

I prefer Media Player Classic - Home Cinema because it can be set to automatically normalize the audio stream on .aac content. But this does not seem to be a VLC problem (there is a 3.0.21 update) since I just played a 1080p HDR file and it works fine. The HDR was in the following format:

HEVC
Format/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile : Main 10@L4@Main
HDR format : Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, Profile 8.1, dvhe.08.03, BL+RPU, no metadata compression, HDR10 compatible / SMPTE ST 2086, Version HDR10, HDR10 compatible

You could use the Mediainfo app to examine the files which don't play to see if there are any clues as to why they are different from other files.

https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases

(You can download the zip file for MPC-HC so that you don't have to go through the installer process just in case you don't like it.)

 

[CapnBillysWhizzbang]

Have you tried other video formatted players like Movie/TV or WindowsMedia Player? VLC is weird when it comes to Video Playbacks so see if it'll work on something else besides it......................................

I kind of felt like if VLC played 1080p HDR/h265 files on The FireTV Stick Max Pro AND on the Vizio smartTV, that the PC App playing it would be a no-brainer. VLC for Android (FireTV and Vizio both use an OS that's "almost" Android and 99% of Android apps work) is HORRIBLE in terms of reliability/stability, I'd give it 1 star out of 5, but it DOES play most videos from NAS when every other Android media player for FireTV and Vizio is useless for playing any videos from a NAS.

Media Player Classic? For h265/HDR/1080p? I thought that was for old stuff that didn't play on newer media players? Is it even being maintained for new(er) video formats?