Hi everyone,
there are plenty of video players for Apple TV, but we felt there was still room for something different: a simple player that can handle high-quality Blu-ray remuxes without giving up the native tvOS playback experience.
Most third-party players build their own playback pipeline to support as many formats as possible. We took a different approach.
Native Player always uses Apple’s built-in playback engine for video playback, combined with real-time remuxing and our own audio rendering engine that we originally developed for our other app, Sound Test for Dolby Atmos.
This means you keep the things that make the native Apple TV player nice to use:
- Hardware video decoding
- Match Content / Match Dynamic Range
- Native tvOS playback UI
- Native seeking and scrubbing
- Reduce Loud Sounds
- Native subtitle rendering
- And other playback features Apple adds to tvOS in the future
But at the same time, we can support formats that Apple’s player cannot normally handle directly. And this is probably the most important part:
To our knowledge, Native Player is the first Apple TV player that supports both TrueHD Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision Profile 7 Blu-ray remuxes as Dolby Vision.
That includes two things other popular tvOS players currently cannot do:
TrueHD Atmos — instead of decoding TrueHD to 7.1 PCM and losing the Atmos information, Native Player uses our custom audio rendering engine to preserve the Atmos mix.
Dolby Vision Profile 7 — instead of falling back to HDR10, Native Player converts the Dolby Vision RPU metadata to Profile 8.1 on the fly, allowing Apple’s native video pipeline to output Dolby Vision with dynamic metadata.
There are some Apple TV hardware limitations involved in both cases, which I explain below.
If you encounter a file that doesn't play correctly, you can report it directly from the app so we can investigate it.
Native Player is free to download on Apple TV: APP STORE
I’d really like to hear feedback, especially from people with large Blu-ray remux libraries, Dolby Vision TVs, and Atmos setups.
LOADING MOVIES
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.
FEATURES
- Simple drag-and-drop movie transfer through a web browser
- Wide container, codec and profile support
- Native tvOS playback UI
- Apple Match Content support
- Native subtitles with adjustable timing
- Comprehensive Dolby Vision support
- Comprehensive Dolby Atmos support
- DTS-HD and DTS:X support
- Built-in Dolby Atmos audio diagnostics
DOLBY ATMOS / TRUEHD
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, 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.
DOLBY VISION / HDR
Native Player supports:
- HDR10
- HDR10+
- HLG
- Dolby Vision Profile 5
- Dolby Vision Profile 7
- Dolby Vision Profile 8
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 — no tvOS app can.
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.
AV1 / DOLBY VISION PROFILE 10
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.
CONTAINERS
- MKV
- MP4
- MOV
- TS
- M2TS
- MTS
- M4V
VIDEO CODECS
- H.265 / HEVC
- H.264 / AVC
- MPEG-4 Part 2
- AV1*
*AV1 playback depends on hardware decoding support.
AUDIO CODECS
- Dolby TrueHD Atmos
- Dolby TrueHD
- Dolby Digital Plus / E-AC-3
- Dolby Digital / AC-3
- DTS
- DTS-HD Master Audio
- DTS-HD High Resolution
- DTS:X
- AAC
- FLAC
- ALAC
- APAC
- PCM
- MP3
SUBTITLES
- TX3G
- SRT — internal and external
- ASS
This is version 1.0.0, so right now I’m actually very interested in hearing about the files that don’t work. If you have a weird MKV, M2TS, UHD Blu-ray remux, TrueHD Atmos track, or Dolby Vision file that causes problems, please report it through the app.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions as well.
Thanks!
