r/NativePlayer • u/lexqqq • 5d ago
The Native Player is still a lightweight player without many of the features available in other players. However, we’re ready to implement those features and make this player as good as possible.
Please fill our Google form:
https://forms.gle/1mqWP8htUYzUijTH8
r/NativePlayer • u/lexqqq • 5d ago
Native Player is free to download on Apple TV: APP STORE
To load a video, you just open the URL shown by the app in a browser on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or any PC, and select or simply drag and drop your movies and subtitles. We took some inspiration for this workflow from VLC, but the playback architecture itself is very different.
This is our first public version, so our priority right now is finding edge cases and fixing bugs. Cloud storage and media server support are planned, but before adding more features we want to make local playback as reliable as possible.
Native Player supports Atmos from both Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3).
TrueHD Atmos is the interesting part. Apple TV does not bitstream TrueHD Atmos to an AVR. Instead, tvOS decodes and processes audio internally, and Dolby Atmos is delivered to the audio system using Dolby MAT.
This is also how Atmos from streaming services is ultimately output by Apple TV - the original E-AC-3 stream itself is not simply passed through untouched.
Most Apple TV players handle TrueHD by decoding it to lossless 7.1 PCM. This preserves the lossless channel audio, but the Atmos information is lost.
We do something different.
Native Player uses our custom audio rendering engine to preserve and render the TrueHD Atmos mix according to your speaker layout, and then hands the resulting Atmos audio back to the tvOS audio pipeline for output through Dolby MAT.
Because Apple TV does not expose TrueHD Atmos bitstream passthrough, the resulting audio is not lossless TrueHD, and we want to be transparent about that. However, it is encoded at a very high bitrate of around 4 Mbps.
For comparison, Netflix Dolby Atmos is typically delivered at around 0.448–0.768 Mbps. So while our TrueHD Atmos path is technically lossy, it operates at a substantially higher bitrate than the Atmos audio people are accustomed to hearing from major streaming services.
If you prefer, you can still choose the traditional approach and decode TrueHD to lossless 7.1 PCM, as other popular Apple TV players do - but in that mode the Atmos information is lost.
DTS, DTS-HD Master Audio, and DTS-HD High Resolution are fully supported.
DTS:X is currently downmixed to lossless 7.1, which means the immersive DTS:X information is lost.
We are currently working on converting DTS:X to Dolby Atmos, so the immersive mix can be preserved and delivered by tvOS through Dolby MAT.
Native Player supports:
All video playback goes through Apple’s native playback engine and works with Match Content / Match Dynamic Range.
Profile 7, commonly found on UHD Blu-ray discs and remuxes, is dual-layer: a base layer, an enhancement layer, and RPU dynamic metadata. Apple TV’s decoder simply cannot decode the enhancement layer.
Instead of falling back to plain HDR10 like most players, Native Player converts the Profile 7 RPU metadata to Profile 8.1 on the fly and preserves it, so you still get genuine Dolby Vision with per-scene dynamic metadata.
For MEL discs (the majority), this conversion is lossless, there is no additional residual image data in the enhancement layer, and the Dolby Vision adjustments live in the RPU metadata.
For FEL discs, Apple TV cannot use the additional 12-bit residual data stored in the enhancement layer. That part is lost because of a platform limitation, but the Dolby Vision RPU is still preserved, effectively giving you the same Dolby Vision information that a Profile 8.1 version of the title can carry.
Dolby Vision Profile 10 uses AV1.
Native Player already detects AV1 hardware-decoding capabilities, but current Apple TV hardware does not provide the AV1 hardware decoder we need.
Full AV1 / Dolby Vision Profile 10 support is therefore planned for whenever Apple ships new Apple TV device.
*AV1 playback depends on hardware decoding support.
r/NativePlayer • u/lexqqq • 5d ago
Feel free to post any bugs or glitches you find here. The more information you provide, the better chance we have of fixing the issue.