On tvOS KSPlayer is used for playback by default. More specifically, the lgpl license version. It supports HDR using:

• HDR10
• HDR10+
• Dolby Vision (Profile 5)

Video playback in the iOS and iPadOS is powered by VLCKit, a wrapper of libVLC which is the library that powers VLC. It’s also available on tvOS as an option. It’s recommended for older devices at is tends to be more performant than KSPlayer.

Devices Getting Warm

Worth nothing regarding VLCKit on iOS is that older devices might get warm if they do not support hardware decoding of the video format you’re watching. VLCKit falls back to software decoding which can be taxing on the hardware. This is normal but ideally you should only watch videos encoded in a format your device can hardware decode.

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