Does dolby vision playback for movies work with Libre Elec on the Minix u9-h?

Quote from chrisssj2

When you say you test 3 different dolby vision movies. What was your test material? Also the m8S pro is not the Minix uh-9?

Some additional commands? hmmm perhaps someone can remember

Transformers:The Last Knight, Spider-man:Homecoming, The Fate of the Furious.

Correct, M8S Pro is not Minix U9-H, but it has the same S912 SoC as the Minix U9H and from LibreELEC point of view, they are identical in features. I can test the Minix U9-H also, but I am 110% positive that the outcome will not be any different.

Quote from chrisssj2

Oh really... so it doesn't activate the Dolby Vision for you hmmm.. I really am wondering how some users made it work then....
Thanks for testing this!

Who are these users? I asked you about this on Kodi forum, but you never addressed it.

I've deleted the post linking to Reddit that Discusses PIracy and Chinese UHD Oppo clone media players.

Trust in what wesk05 tells us that LE 8.2 cannot playback DV and pass the correct metadata to a DV display. He has HDMI analytical equipment that can log and give detailed info on such video streams. I seriously doubt LE 9.x Leia is any different if it runs the same AML Nougat based Linux Kernel

Frankly 99% of Reddit posters have no idea what they are on about.

For the moment i think that the biggest problem to be able to read a mkv file with DV Inside is that only one video track can be enable as "default track" in a mkv file.

Quote from wrxtasy

Frankly 99% of Reddit posters have no idea what they are on about.

Lolol very true

But yes, it's much easier to focus on the m2ts files and worry about better containers later. But it's becoming clear that mediacodec on Android and AVFoundation on tvOS have only implemented single-layer DV, and I'm worried that without any easily accessible software implementations this is gonna be a really tough thing to get working. PowerDVD doesn't support DV on Windows, right?

It's a repeat of the whole patented Dolby Digital audio decoding era...

Where if you did not have a Dolby Audio licence, a media player could Not decode DD 5.1 and output that to a 2.0 PCM audio only TV.

NVIDIA Shield owners that watch DD 5.1 TV are familiar with this limitation when using specific Apps.

Kodi uses a free reverse engineered open source DD audio decoder/encoder that is included in with it's packaged ffmpeg:

FFmpeg Codecs Documentation

So I suspect without a DolbyVision licence we likely have no hope of processing the DV metadata layer that Blurays use.

The MINIX U9-H may be DV capable hardware, but does it even have the (probably needed) DV licence to begin with ?

No DV support with PowerDVD on Windows either.

Quote from narenh

But it's becoming clear that mediacodec on Android and AVFoundation on tvOS have only implemented single-layer DV

ATV4K supports dual layer and single layer single-track Dolby Vision profiles. The Dolby Vision demo clips floating around all have dual-layer single track Dolby Vision profile. MediaInfo will show this information for the video track

Dolby Vision : 1.0, dvhe.dtr@uhd24, BL+EL+RPU

dvhe.dtr bitstream profile string indicates that this is Dolby Vision profile 4. The strings for other common profiles are dvhe.stb (profile 5), dvhe.dtb (profile 7).

dv-Dolby Vision, he-HEVC, d-dual layer, t- 10-bit, r - backwards compatible/can be decoded to SDR, BL-base layer, EL-Enhancement layer, RPU-Reference Processing Unit (metadata). s- single layer, b - backwards compatible with Blu-ray format. The "n" in profile 5 indicates that it is not backwards compatible. The stream is in IPTPQc2/IPT color space.

Quote from wrxtasy

So I suspect without a DolbyVision licence we likely have no hope of processing the DV metadata layer that Blurays use.The MINIX U9-H may be DV capable hardware, but does it even have the (probably needed) DV licence to begin with ?

From Dolby:

Quote

Every Dolby Vision playback device must pass Dolby Vision system development kit certification. During the certification procedure, the chipset implementing the Dolby Vision decoder will be tested against the advertised device capabilities, and Dolby will approve the device capabilities.

ATV4K wouldn't help you play back DV content from UHD discs. And 4K movies on iTunes are pretty bit-starved, my old iTunes digital copy of The Dark Knight got upgraded to 4K and there are noticeable compression artifacts that aren't present on the UHD disc (and yes, I have content matching on so it's not the fault of Apple's atrocious SDR->HDR/DV tone-mapping).

So I guess the final word is that we have to wait until someone can reverse engineer dual-track DV playback? Thanks for the layer/track clarification @wesk05!

Maybe off topic, but as a continuation of the ATV discussion.

I had a look at this refurbished ATV offer and found the following in the ATV spec:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TV and Video

H.264/HEVC SDR video up to 2160p, 60 fps, Main/Main 10 profile

HEVC Dolby Vision (Profile 5)/HDR10 (Main 10 profile) up to 2160p

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had a quick look at Dolby Vision Profiles and Levels and found the following

It looks like Profile 5 is for 1080p resolutions only.

Looks pretty useless to me.

laowai

DV is a separate "invisible" layer, so it having a lower resolution doesn't affect picture quality.

Quote from The Coolest

laowai

DV is a separate "invisible" layer, so it having a lower resolution doesn't affect picture quality.

Hmmm... the spec is a bit misleading, you recon this is a resolution of the second stream?

Yes.

DV is just another "video" track, parallel to the HDR10 video track.

At least this is how it works with DV media.

The Coolest: for dual-track DV implementations, this is correct. UHD discs use a 1080p DV track, even though the main HDR10 track is 2160p. However, single-track implementations work differently. The Apple TV 4K only supports single-track DV, and the only test files we have are LG TV demo videos and the Aerial flyovers from entries.json. Dual-track DV is (imho) the more important problem to solve, as there is no actual single-track DV content publicly available outside of the iTunes Store—and there are many DV UHD discs that people have ripped into their own personal collections.

Quote from laowai

H.264/HEVC SDR video up to 2160p, 60 fps, Main/Main 10 profile

HEVC Dolby Vision (Profile 5)/HDR10 (Main 10 profile) up to 2160p

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It looks like Profile 5 is for 1080p resolutions only.

Looks pretty useless to me.

There are Dolby Vision profiles and levels. You are looking at the levels. Check page 7 of the document for profiles. Profiles 4,5,7 (1:1/4) all support up to uhd60 level.

Just wanted to add that testing support for this might get difficult. It appears that your TV must support both Dolby Vision on the TV itself, as well as being able to accept Dolby Vision over a separate HDMI device (STB). This seems to be a fairly common thing folks have noticed - they can use Dolby Vision on the TV itself via the built in apps, but the TV won't accept Dolby Vision via HDMI. Not sure if they are two totally different things, as some TV's don't seem to have the limitation. Hoping it's firmware.

Hopefully future firmware upgrades can rectify this for the TV's that suffer from this problem. But as it is now, it's important to verify that your TV will actually play Dolby Vision via HDMI, and not just via the TV built in apps. I hope it isn't a hardware thing or lots of good folks will be pissed!

I can see this causing some grief when testing starts getting serious into Dolby Vision. Just thought I'd mention it in case it hasn't been mentioned before.