Only had a few minutes but tested a few TrueHD movies. Largest was about 40GB.
All played well. My Denon reported either Atmos or PCM for input.
Lip sync and all appeared good even with slipping forward & back or jumping chapters.
I did have 1 MKV that gave an error playing. AV1 video with TrueHD audio. I clicked on the button to submit it for review.
This file plays fine in Infuse & Plezy with the native players, but obviously all height info is lost.

Thanks again for this effort.
As others have said, concentrate on the player first. Plex & other integration later. External player works fine for now.

Let us know when we can contribute $$$ to the cause!

Native Player can be used as an external player. Keep browsing in the app you're used to (Plex/Jellyfin/Emby clients, Stremio-addon apps …) and hand playback over to Native Player, so you get:

- Dolby Vision Profile 7
- TrueHD Atmos
- DTS:X

Apps support this in one of two ways:

• Native Player built in: Some apps already list Native Player as an external player option. Just select it in the app's settings.

• Custom player: Some apps let you add your own external player (often called a "custom player" or "custom URL scheme"). You add Native Player there yourself. The list below shows what to enter.

📋Apps that can open videos in Native Player (tvOS)

The list isn't complete. There are probably more apps with a custom player option where Native Player works too. If you find one, please share it in the comments so we can add it.

Your app doesn't support it?

Ask the developer to add Native Player as an external player and send them the developer doc below. If the app already supports Infuse, it's a very small change: Native Player's x-callback-url works the same way as Infuse's, with the same parameters and the same progress sent back. Details below:

⚙️ Native Player deep link integration

Featured inside Native Player

Every app that fully supports Native Player with x-callback-url so watch progress syncs back to the app, will be featured inside Native Player in the next version, coming soon.

Comment here to help us keeping this list fresh.

• Faster, smoother URL streaming: rebuilt buffering engine with quick seeking and lower CPU and memory use.

• Fixed slight audio/video sync drift on Atmos tracks after seeking.

• Audio picker now shows track titles from the file.

• Stability and diagnostics improvements.

I would like the ability to add a WebDAV source like torbox.app and just browse the media files within Native Player and hit play on the files..

Copying the url from such a streaming service obviously breaks because their download urls are temporary..

If there is a better way to use NativePlayer for this use case, I'd be happy to hear..

How does the application handle dual-layer Dolby Vision profile 7 MKV files? What is the appearance of the output relative to the original source?

The top image is Native Player launched by Plezy the bottom is Infuse. Native Player has the additional Atmos playback on Apple TV (amazing) but is missing the extra audio description data to help users find things like director commentary.. One Blu-ray rip I have has two different mixes (Pulp Fiction) without pulling over this description data, it makes it very difficult to determine which is which… Keep up the great work!

Just to say I’ve downloaded the app and it runs nicely with most files I’ve thrown its way. Including transcoding DTS-X to Atmos.
Sometimes however with big files if you skip it just gives up, especially 4K Remuxes.
But a few questions, do you intend to allow for cloud storage like google drive/outlook/mega?
And WebDAV support also?

And how does it work with HomePods? Infuse seems to work well with HomePods and their capabilities. The app doesn’t find them as Atmos compatible and I know infuse said it had to have a specific code added so they work properly.
Also if you could get iCloud Drive files to play that would be awesome.
I am excited by this app though as it really could be something very special on Apple TV

No plex or smb sources? What’s the point of the app if I can’t connect to the server with movie files?

DTS:X - now rendered in 7.1.4

This is the biggest technical change in v1.1. In v1.0, DTS:X tracks were decoded to their backward-compatible 7.1 bed. The four height channels a DTS:X stream carries are pre-mixed into that bed at a lower level, so playback was correct, but the height information stayed "flattened" into the floor channels.

With v1.1, Native Player decodes the four dedicated height channels from the lossless (XLL) extension, subtracts their downmix contribution from the bed and reconstructs the discrete 7.1.4 presentation.

To be clear about what this is and isn't:

• We are NOT bitstreaming DTS:X to your AVR. The 7.1.4 mix is rendered inside Native Player and played through the Apple TV's spatial audio pipeline, which outputs over Dolby MAT, so during playback your AVR will display Dolby Atmos, not DTS:X.

• This covers the standard DTS:X profile which is what's on essentially every DTS:X Blu-ray. The rarer object-based variants (e.g. IMAX Enhanced) currently fall back to the 7.1 bed, exactly like v1.0, nothing is lost, just no height separation.

• The original lossless 7.1 track also remains available in the audio picker if you prefer it untouched.

We DON'T currently plan to go further into object-based DTS:X rendering. It's a different technical problem (positional object metadata instead of fixed channels) and the newer object-era technology is still within active patents, unlike the long-expired core and the now-expired foundational lossless (XLL) patents that the 7.1.4 path builds on.

For us, getting DTS:X height channels to play at all on an Apple TV (instead of everything collapsing to 7.1) was the breakthrough of this release.

Play directly from a URL

You can now give Native Player a direct media URL and start playback without first transferring the file to the Apple TV. You can add a URL in two ways: directly on the Apple TV in the Sources tab or through the web interface.

Apart from being useful on its own, this is also an important foundation for what's coming next.

Use Native Player as an external player

Native Player can now be launched by other tvOS apps through deep links. That means another app can hand a media URL to Native Player and use it purely as the playback engine.

The other app needs to explicitly support our deep-link format because Apple TV doesn't have a system-wide "default external player" mechanism.

nativeplayer://play?url=<video URL>&name=<title>&sub=<subtitle URL>

or

nativeplayer://x-callback-url/play?url=<video URL>

Want your favourite app to support this? Reach out to its developers and ask them to add Native Player to their external-player list. For apps that already launch Infuse or VLC it's a one-line addition and this urls is all the documentation they need.

TO DO: Plex, Jellyfin, SMB/NAS...

This was probably the clearest feedback from the previous post. Many of you basically said: "Looks interesting. Now let me use it with my existing library."

Fair enough. :-) We also ran a poll about what we should build next and we're using those results to prioritize upcoming versions. The goal is for Native Player to eventually become the playback engine for the library you already have.

Native Player is still free

We do plan to introduce a small Premium tier soon to support us in continued development. The goal isn't to turn Native Player into another expensive subscription, it's simply to make continued development sustainable.

What do you think about $5/year or $25 lifetime, for early adopters?

FIXES

• Fixed “Cannot Open” errors affecting some 4K HEVC (HDR) files

• Fixed endless loading and audio dropouts with TrueHD Atmos content

• Fixed playback issues that prevented certain Dolby Atmos movies from starting

• Improved seeking reliability with TrueHD Atmos content

NEW FEATURES

• Added support for standalone audio files (M4A, MKA), including Dolby TrueHD Atmos and Dolby Digital Plus Atmos music

• Dolby Vision P7 FEL can now be played with either P8 or HDR10 conversion

We’re currently working on direct HTTP(S) URL playback and external player support for version 1.1.0. A big thank you to everyone who reported playback issues and helped us track down and fix these bugs. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful.

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

Native Player is free to download on Apple TV: APP STORE

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.

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

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.