Kodi menus+movies washed out colors/over exposed only in 4K

There are no official HDR capable LE images for Intel GPU hardware at the moment. You are probably seeing HDR content rendered in SDR.

Search for smp HDR builds in this forum.

Quote from Biomecanoid

I lose some settings from the TV

Your TV is probably switching to a PC mode or something like that.

PC mode is what is called Gaming mode or HDMI Deep Colour mode on other TVs, right ? Instead, this should be set to ON fo RPi, is this right ?

Quote from Biomecanoid

Hello its not about HDR even the menus are too bright and over-explored, I am not talking about only the movies. Plus in 1080p and 2K its fine

It can be a mismatch between the TV PC mode setting and the Kodi RGB limited color range setti g. They must match.

PC Mode and Gaming Mode can mean different things on different TVs :

1. Gaming Mode on modern TVs usually means that the TV reduces the latency of its processing to the lowest amount it can - to reduce lag in gaming. This will often disable motion smoothing, noise reduction etc. processing that requires multiple frames to be buffered for processing.

2. PC Mode can mean a couple of things :

a) Full range 1-254/0-255 (*) levels are used (or the 10-/12-bit equivalents) rather than the broadcast standard 16-235 levels. (DVI outputs on PCs were historically 0-255/1-254, but HDMI outputs on most DVD players, Blu-ray players, set top boxes etc. were the video standard 16-235, which is the level space used in production and in encoding MPEG2/h.264/h.265 for DVD/BD/UHDBD and DVB/ATSC/ISDB TV). Historically this was a setting that needed to be manually set on an HDMI input - but increasingly most modern sources will signal their level range in an HDMI InfoFrame - which modern displays will interpret and switch accordingly. Games Consoles often offer 0-255/1-254 output as an option as it - in theory - gives you more levels to play with in 8-bit video, potentially reducing banding a bit.

If you feed a display expecting 0-255/1-254 video a 16-235 video source (and that ignores InfoFrames or they have been overridden) you will see black levels that are grey and desaturated colours. If you feed a display expecting 16-235 video a 0-255/1-254 video source (and that ignored InfoFrame or they have been overridden) you will see blacks that are crushed and clipped whites and over-saturated colour.

b) Overscan simulation is disabled and the full width and full height of the source is displayed (by default most displays simulate CRT over scanning and crop an amount from the edges of a picture and zoom in slightly)

HOWEVER - if you are only seeing this issue with 4K material - almost all of which is Rec 2020 ST.2084/PQ/HDR10 then it's likely to be an HDR issue.

1. If your PC is outputting HDR10 video (which is what most UHD Blu-ray content is) but flagging it as SDR - then you will see washed out colours, blacks that are grey, dim whites etc.

2. If your PC is outputting Rec 709 video (which is less common for UHD stuff) but flagging it as HDR10 (or your TV is automatically assuming your UHD source is HDR10) then you will get over saturated colours, crushed blacks, burned out whites etc.

I would take your display out of any custom settings modes for that HDMI input as a starting point (maybe even factory reset it) just to make sure you haven't set any video settings you didn't mean to.

noggin, so if you use the device only to watch movies, the limited colour range mode does not afffect picture quality, right?

Quote from giannia

noggin, so if you use the device only to watch movies, the limited colour range mode does not afffect picture quality, right?

Video is produced in the 16-235 (64-940 10-bit) range in broadcast studios and post-production areas, and that is the level space used for DVB/ATSC broadcasts, DVD, Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray mastering. Most HDMI outputs from set-top boxes and DVD/BD/UHD BD players will also be in the 16-235 (64-940 10-bit and whatever the 12-bit equivalent is)

So in an ideal world you keep everything in the same 16-235 level space - which avoids cropping any <16 and >235 level content that may be present (you can have <16 and >235 content in 16-235 level space video - the 1-15 and 235-254 range are there to avoid clipping transients - which could cause ringing - and to give you a bit of headroom).

HOWEVER - beware the Kodi setting for 16-235 Limited output - that is for a very specific, and increasingly less useful, use case ISTR. I haven't used x86 LibreElec since the days of Chromeboxes, so am not sure what the x86 GPU Limited/Full range driver situation is.

Quote from Biomecanoid

its not just limited color range black is super light grey. Everything is over exposed including the kodi menus. You can watch anything like that

Is that you enabling Limited Colour Range in the Kodi system setting menus? If so that's for a very specific use case - it doesn't enable the Limited output range in your GPU driver settings, it is there to solve a problem in older systems. In many cases this will output a nasty 'double limited range' these days (it was there to bypass video cards/drivers that would only output Full range when people had Limited range displays, and before InfoFrames flagging Limited vs Full were in widespread use).

You can use 3dluts.

Please, read this post

4K / HDR content

do you have by any chance a samsung tv.

i had the same problem. its not ga.e mode but the bd wise that is on by defailt. its some samsung blu-ray optimalisation.

turn it off. that fixed it for me