Intel true 10bits/HEVC/HDR support... ?

  • LibreElec on NUCs does not yet support HDR output. It currently uses tone mapping to display HDR as SDR, so it looks correct albeit without full 10bit colour/contrast range.

  • LibreElec on NUCs does not yet support HDR output. It currently uses tone mapping to display HDR as SDR, so it looks correct albeit without full 10bit colour/contrast range.

    Thanks for your reply, I did some investigation and it sounds like you're on the money.

    It seems like the Intel NUCs are kind of hardware limited, they should really have HDMI 2.0b for example. I may need ot simply wait to till the next lightweight series. They're not quite there, sadly.

    Oddly enough, in X (??) months, a $35 Pi4 will be just as good once the software is there. Embarassing for Intel.

  • The NUC has hdmi 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.2

    The DisplayPort, via thunderbolt 3, is not enough for hdr.

    The hdmi port is absolutely fine though. The difference between hdmi 2.0a and 2.0b is HLG which shouldn’t have any effect for the majority of what people would use a NUC for.

    I have no problems using my NUC booted into windows with HDR. The pi might be better but it’s newer (newer will always be better...) - you’ll also have the heat issue to deal with. My silent fanless 8th gen NUC is perfect for me at the moment, running much cooler than my pi 4 does just at idle...

    The pi 4 is very good, though I dislike the amount of heat it’s putting out. Not so sure about the embarrassment part for intel, I don’t think they focus too much on media consumption, certainly on a Linux OS, for the NUCs.

  • I have no problems using my NUC booted into windows with HDR. The pi might be better but it’s newer (newer will always be better...) - you’ll also have the heat issue to deal with. My silent fanless 8th gen NUC is perfect for me at the moment, running much cooler than my pi 4 does just at idle...

    Any chance I can pick your brain PlatypusW? I have an 8th gen NUC and its not working out for me I feel. When I enable HDR in windows it looks horrible, so washed out and gray. Your not having this issue?

  • Hi PlatypusW, which NUC do you have? Do you know if an 8th gen Intel i3 NUC would be enough to run 4K HDR or an i5/7 is better?

    Thank you.

    I have the i5 (8th gen). I only did this because I like to have the option of a little more power - and who knows, when the graphics gets too old I might end up using it for something more cpu intensive - I’ve at least put my haswell NUC too good use :)

    Anyway, yes an i3 is fine for 4k HDR, all processors have exactly the same graphics.

  • Any chance I can pick your brain PlatypusW? I have an 8th gen NUC and its not working out for me I feel. When I enable HDR in windows it looks horrible, so washed out and gray. Your not having this issue?

    It was a while ago that I sorted my windows setup now, pretty much got the NUC at launch. I didn’t note much down as I didn’t plan on having a windows OS for very long as I was hoping Linux would be sorted out by now but clearly not (though it sounds like it’s getting closer).

    I’ll admit I had a few hiccups with setup - but at the time I felt that was down to the tv model I was using - there seemed to be a few issues that were different depending on the tv model.

    At any rate - what software are you using for playback? I did find that certain software wasn’t outputting hdr (properly).

    My current setup is kodi frontend with mpc-hc and madvr in backend. It seemed to be the easiest way to get hdr to work for me - but I’m fairly certain that was down to my tv and the drivers at the time, I don’t know if things have improved (or got worse). As far as I can tell I don’t have greyed out colours, I have done a few comparisons between it and my uhd player.

  • There is nothing wrong with current Intel NUC's hardware. HDR support has just appeared in Linux kernel 5.3 and it is not yet implemented in Kodi.

    The Milhouse Matrix (Kodi 19) LE alpha builds with Linux 5.3 have just started. I’ve ordered a new NVME SSD especially for testing these builds on my NUC8i3BEH. I’ll leave my current LE 9.2 SSD untouched so I have a fully working Kodi 18.4.