Could Infuse use Profile 7 RPU for lossless MEL playback now—and support full FEL on future Apple TV hardware?
I have read the existing discussions about Profile 7/8 support, automatic P7-to-P8 conversion and native FEL reconstruction. Recent developments (like being able to decode FEL on iPhone as shown above) made me wonder whether Infuse could take a staged approach.
As I understand the current situation, Infuse on Apple TV plays Profile 7 as the HDR10 base layer and does not use the MEL/FEL enhancement layer or RPU metadata.
Could Infuse adopt a Shield-like approach, but improve on it by distinguishing between MEL and FEL?
Since MEL (Minimum Enhancement Layer) by definition contains no residual picture information, would there be any downsides to simply discarding the zero-residual enhancement layer and present the result as Profile 8.1 during playback? This would not be “fake Dolby Vision” in my opinion. Since MEL contains no residual picture information, no image data or quality would be lost, and the source’s actual dynamic RPU metadata would be processed, making the best possible use of the available film data without re-encoding.
My copies of Dune: Part One, Dune: Part Two and Ready Player One are BL+MEL+RPU, so falling back to HDR10 and leaving their RPU unused seems unnecessary.
FEL could be handled separately. Infuse could either retain the safe HDR10 fallback or, where hardware permits, decode and combine BL+FEL+RPU properly.
Full FEL reconstruction appears increasingly feasible on the newer Apple chips. The latest "iNAS Player" app for iPhone recently announced FEL support and now appear to display the "This device can decode FEL" test correctly on my iPhone (as shown in the picture above). The "Woman at 80 seconds" also shows the woman at 80 seconds as expected, but there are some color blips in between the revolving colors that I think shouldn't be there.
Could Infuse take a staged approach and support lossless MEL-to-P8.1 playback now, while treating FEL separately and potentially supporting complete FEL reconstruction on newer Apple TV hardware (and iPhone)? What is currently the main obstacle: tvOS APIs, Dolby licensing, hardware performance or implementation complexity?