Dolby Vision w/FEL + 3D for PC (AMD/Intel/nVidia)

    Quote from DMDreview

    Pc vs Oppo, Dune HD, CEAM S922x. FEL and 12 bit.

    In case anyone is interested in taking a look.

    Dolby vision FEL and 12 bit output

    I've been waiting for this, you excelled my expectations! what an amazing analysis, I didn't spend to long trying to understand the meaning, I trust you know what you are doing. love that you can now create custom made test suit to deep dive into the different implementations. It seems CroqueMr confidence was well placed. everything he mentioned about the accuracy is vindicated. I can't believe how much more accurate the PC is, the gold standard of the AM6B+ only came 3rd! wow. PC wipes the floor with them in terms of displaying 12 bit DV FEL. well done for this amazing work, also to CroqueMr, you really have revolutionised this hobby of many people.

    -One thing I would like to know is, AM6B+ has official Dolby vision FEL natively supported in hardware, then how was it of so much compared to PC.
    - are you planning on comparing the VS10 vs CroqueMr conversations.

    wow I'm even more excited now! well done CroqueMr . Thanks DMDreview , looking forward to your next video!

    will be making some reddit posts once CroqueMr releasing next release with bug fixes and reference the video to show the king of DV FEL is PC spearheaded by CroqueMr

    I am testing on a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a GTX 1030. I had to go with Hades version because the other hangs for me after the LibreELEC splash screen just sitting on the build information at the top of the screen. I was able to get past this into Kodi with the Hades version.

    I am able to play back DV but I am getting choppy picture but not by that much. Feels like it is so close to running smoothly. Just wondering if there is any settings I should further tweak or is this card just pretty underpowered?

    LibreELEC Hades 1.0 RC5 is out

    Dolby Vision now goes out the way licensed players send it, in IPT, with every one of the 12 bits of an FEL film computed in floating point.

    What's new

    • IPT, as licensed players send it. Profiles 7 and 8 reach the TV in IPT-PQ-c2, converted in floating point and packed with the matrices that profile 5 films carry. The TV no longer converts the YCbCr itself, so the colour between the two pixels of each chroma pair no longer depends on how it interpolates. Profile 5 is unchanged, byte for byte.
    • Seeks no longer freeze the picture. Seeking from the progress bar or a bookmark stopped drawing for up to half a second, every time over a network. Kodi now keeps drawing and shows the target time at once.
    • A stream that runs dry keeps its pictures and its FEL layer. Stock Kodi drops the rest of the group of pictures after a drain; Hades restarts the decoder at the last random-access point.
    • In sync with the sound. Native Dolby Vision went out one refresh early (50 to 77 ms at 23.976 Hz on AMD integrated graphics). It is now timed like the ordinary output, and kodi.log shows the measured A/V offset.
    • Dolby Vision starts sooner: the Dolby Vision signal goes out with the change of mode, so the TV sets itself up while the film opens.
    • Native Dolby Vision on older AMD graphics: Radeon RX 400 and 500 (Polaris), RX Vega M, RX Vega 56 and 64, and Radeon VII.
    • NVIDIA laptops whose HDMI runs through a DisplayPort output: Dolby Vision starts again, and every change of refresh rate resets the output so the TV takes it.
    • Dual-track Dolby Vision MP4 files whose enhancement track is an ordinary HEVC track now play with their FEL layer instead of as HDR10.
    • 3D subtitles at the depth the disc asks for, frame by frame, on 3D Blu-ray and MVC remuxes.
    • HDR10+: all nine percentiles measured when Dolby Vision is sent as HDR10+, Intel at 2160p24, 25 and 30, RTX 50, GTX 16 to RTX 30 with HDMI VRR, and version 0 displays.
    • Dolby Vision for the menus as an option, and exact dark tones for menus and subtitles over HDR.
    • Menus over a Dolby Vision video cost less GPU time where they are opaque and still, with the same bytes.
    • The Dolby Vision page of the player information fits its panel, and you can choose the output of the current video from it.
    • The Installer boot entry now installs Hades' own boot loader and safe defaults, on GPT and MBR disks.
    • Up to date and safer: LibreELEC, Mesa 26.2.6, nine fixes from Kodi master, and fixes in expat, OpenSSL, curl, OpenSSH, BlueZ, avahi and libbluray.

    Measurements
    On 14 FEL frames through the software bridge, the IPT tunnel stays within 1 code of 4095 of an ideal double-precision conversion, and a reference model of it shows no merged steps on generated 12-bit test pictures. Our Dolby Vision to SDR mapping, compared frame by frame with the SDR grade of Netflix's Sol Levante, gives a mean ΔE ITP of 12.9; the other mappings we tried came out between 16 and 58.

    DMDreview thanks for the FEL video. It is exactly the kind of measurement this needs, and it confirmed what licensed players send. If you have time for your next test with the 1 nit file, we would be glad to be measured with your tool.

    What is new in RC5 has not been tried on hardware yet; everything earlier versions showed working still holds. Reports with the diagnostic switch on are very welcome.

    Download 1.0 RC5 (image, update file, Windows installer and sources)
    Full changelog

    Edited once, last by hadesdevls (October 29, 2026 at 3:00 AM).

    I'm going to test RC5 shortly but wanted to give some more info on my previous testing.

    I was testing with some very large high bitrate files to begin with, and now that I am trying a smaller file with lower bitrate the playback is much more "normal" with only slight hitches if there is fast movement. Wired gigabit connection streaming from SMB on the same wired network so I would think network wouldn't be my issue here but maybe I'm ignorant of something.

    I was able to squeeze a bit more performance by setting Present frames a frame ahead as NEVER and fidelity step down to level 3, but the high bitrate files are still struggling just a little bit.

    I will report if RC5 delivers any better performance. Thanks!

    Quote from ApexAftermath

    I am testing on a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a GTX 1030. I had to go with Hades version because the other hangs for me after the LibreELEC splash screen just sitting on the build information at the top of the screen. I was able to get past this into Kodi with the Hades version.

    I am able to play back DV but I am getting choppy picture but not by that much. Feels like it is so close to running smoothly. Just wondering if there is any settings I should further tweak or is this card just pretty underpowered?

    Thanks for trying it, and good to hear it boots and plays Dolby Vision on a GT 1030: you're the first to report a GTX 10 card, which runs on NVIDIA's 580 driver in Hades.

    The GT 1030 is at the very bottom for this. Every Dolby Vision frame is rebuilt and packed on the GPU at 4K, and with an FEL film that is a lot of work for its 384 cores. Hades already lightens that work by itself when the card misses frames, but only so far. Two things help:

    • Turn on Adjust display refresh rate (Settings > Player > Videos), so a 24p film plays at 24 Hz instead of 60.
    • Check whether your card is the GDDR5 or the DDR4 version: the DDR4 one has about a third of the memory bandwidth, and that is usually what holds it back.

    1.0 RC5 is out today. If it is still choppy there, a diagnostic would show exactly what the card does with each frame: switch it on as the README explains, play the same film for a minute and attach the hades-diag folder.

    hcliec001 thank you! Dolby Vision for the menus is off by default: turn on Dolby Vision for the menus in System > Display, with the menus at 3840x2160. The TV then stays in Dolby Vision while you browse, so a Dolby Vision film starts without the TV switching picture modes. Nobody has tried it on a TV yet, so your report will be very welcome when you have the hardware.

    Quote from hadesdevls

    Thanks for trying it, and good to hear it boots and plays Dolby Vision on a GT 1030: you're the first to report a GTX 10 card, which runs on NVIDIA's 580 driver in Hades.

    The GT 1030 is at the very bottom for this. Every Dolby Vision frame is rebuilt and packed on the GPU at 4K, and with an FEL film that is a lot of work for its 384 cores. Hades already lightens that work by itself when the card misses frames, but only so far. Two things help:

    • Turn on Adjust display refresh rate (Settings > Player > Videos), so a 24p film plays at 24 Hz instead of 60.
    • Check whether your card is the GDDR5 or the DDR4 version: the DDR4 one has about a third of the memory bandwidth, and that is usually what holds it back.

    1.0 RC5 is out today. If it is still choppy there, a diagnostic would show exactly what the card does with each frame: switch it on as the README explains, play the same film for a minute and attach the hades-diag folder.

    Turning on adjust display refresh rate seemed to get it very close to normal for The Shining which was the high bitrate file I was testing, but I just fired up Avatar Way of Water and it was unwatchable. I do believe I have the version of this GPU with less ram. I'll work on grabbing that diagnostic. I plan to get something better than this machine, it was just what was laying around and I was getting antsy to try this out.

    Quote from ApexAftermath

    Turning on adjust display refresh rate seemed to get it very close to normal for The Shining which was the high bitrate file I was testing, but I just fired up Avatar Way of Water and it was unwatchable. I do believe I have the version of this GPU with less ram. I'll work on grabbing that diagnostic. I plan to get something better than this machine, it was just what was laying around and I was getting antsy to try this out.

    Glad the refresh rate change brought The Shining close to normal: at 24 Hz the card packs 24 frames a second instead of 60.

    Avatar: The Way of Water is about as heavy as it gets. Which GT 1030 you have matters a lot here: the GDDR5 version has around 48 GB/s of memory bandwidth, the DDR4 one around 17 GB/s, and this work moves a lot of memory per frame. A GDDR5 card should keep up at least as well as an Intel N100 mini PC, which Hades runs on, so if yours is GDDR5 and still struggles, that is something for me to fix, not your hardware.

    Your report already points at two things I want to improve for cards like yours: presenting a frame ahead hurt instead of helping on a GTX 10 card with driver 580, and each decoded picture takes an extra copy on NVIDIA before it is drawn. The diagnostic will show which card you have and where each frame's time goes, so it really helps; I'll use it to make the next version lighter on this kind of card.

    Quote from hadesdevls

    Glad the refresh rate change brought The Shining close to normal: at 24 Hz the card packs 24 frames a second instead of 60.

    Avatar: The Way of Water is about as heavy as it gets. Which GT 1030 you have matters a lot here: the GDDR5 version has around 48 GB/s of memory bandwidth, the DDR4 one around 17 GB/s, and this work moves a lot of memory per frame. A GDDR5 card should keep up at least as well as an Intel N100 mini PC, which Hades runs on, so if yours is GDDR5 and still struggles, that is something for me to fix, not your hardware.

    Your report already points at two things I want to improve for cards like yours: presenting a frame ahead hurt instead of helping on a GTX 10 card with driver 580, and each decoded picture takes an extra copy on NVIDIA before it is drawn. The diagnostic will show which card you have and where each frame's time goes, so it really helps; I'll use it to make the next version lighter on this kind of card.

    I have sadly confirmed I have the DDR4 version. I can still do diagnostics with a file if you'd like, but I'm guessing not a whole lot of point and it is for sure just under powered GPU. Let me know.

    Quote from ApexAftermath

    I have sadly confirmed I have the DDR4 version. I can still do diagnostics with a file if you'd like, but I'm guessing not a whole lot of point and it is for sure just under powered GPU. Let me know.

    Thanks for checking. It is still worth it, and not only for your card: that presenting a frame ahead hurt instead of helping on a GTX 10 card with driver 580 has nothing to do with memory bandwidth, and it likely affects other modest NVIDIA cards too. A diagnostic will show why.

    If you have a moment with RC5: switch the diagnostic on, play the same high bitrate file for a minute with Present frames a frame ahead on its default, then another minute with it on Never, and attach the hades-diag folder. The log measures every late frame both ways, which is exactly what I need to fix it.

    Quote from hadesdevls

    IPT, as licensed players send it. Profiles 7 and 8 reach the TV in IPT-PQ-c2, converted in floating point and packed with the matrices that profile 5 films carry. The TV no longer converts the YCbCr itself, so the colour between the two pixels of each chroma pair no longer depends on how it interpolates. Profile 5 is unchanged, byte for byte.

    Can you explain this a bit more? Profile 7 and 8 content is in YCbCr in the actual file, so decodes to YCbCr in 4:2:0. Which then needs to be upsampled to 4:2:2.

    How can you then output this in IPT without needing to introduce another upsampling to 4:4:4 in order to apply the conversion to get to IPT color-space from the YCbCr pixels? And then need to downsample again to get 4:2:2 for the tunnel?

    Quote from hadesdevls

    LibreELEC Hades 1.0 RC5 is out

    Hi hadesdevls,

    Thanks again for all your hard work on Hades.

    Just wanted to report an issue I've been having with native Dolby Vision on my RTX 5090 since RC3. Unfortunately, the same problem is still present in RC4 and the latest RC5.

    Every Dolby Vision movie I've tried plays in HDR10 instead of Dolby Vision.

    My main PC:

    • CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
    • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5090
    • Display: LG OLED G6 (TV-Led Dolby Vision)
    • Build: LibreELEC Hades 1.0 RC5

    Native Dolby Vision output is enabled, and Low-Latency Dolby Vision is disabled.

    I've also tested both transport options, As licensed players send (IPT) and As composed, but neither made a difference. The TV still switches to HDR10.

    I checked the Kodi logs and found this:

    Dolby Vision detection:

    Code
    Dolby Vision profile 7 level 9
RPU: yes, enhancement layer: yes, base layer: yes

    Main error:

    Code
    DVBridge: native Dolby Vision output unavailable: the display does not advertise Dolby Vision Standard

    Actual output:

    Code
    HDR output: HDR10 goes out at 10 bits in 3840x2160 @ 59.940 Hz

    Here's something interesting I discovered today:

    I installed the same Hades RC5 build on my ASUS Mini PC with an Intel Core i7-1360P and Iris Xe graphics, connected to the same LG G6, and Dolby Vision FEL works perfectly without any issues!

    So RC5 works great with Intel Iris Xe, but native Dolby Vision still won't activate on my RTX 5090.

    I've also previously had native Dolby Vision working on the RTX 5090 using another custom LibreELEC build, so it seems this might be something specific to the NVIDIA output or Dolby Vision detection path in Hades.

    Since the issue has been there since RC3, could you please take a look when you get a chance?

    I've attached a diagnostic log with the relevant details. Hopefully, it helps narrow things down.

    Thanks again for all your efforts. Really appreciate everything you're doing with this project.

    doppingkoala The chroma is never taken to 4:4:4 for P and T; only the intensity uses an interpolated chroma value, so nothing has to be filtered back down.

    For each pair of pixels, from the composed picture:

    • The 4:2:0 chroma goes to 4:2:2 vertically (the same 12-tap Lanczos step the YCbCr tunnel already does).
    • P and T are computed at the even pixel, which sits on the 4:2:2 chroma sample: its own Y and that chroma, through the RPU's matrix to R'G'B', then linear light, LMS, PQ and IPT. No horizontal filter touches them.
    • I is needed for both pixels. For the odd one, its chroma is interpolated horizontally with the same Lanczos, and only its I is kept.

    So at the picture's own size, the only horizontal interpolation is the one any display has to do to turn 4:2:2 into RGB. With the YCbCr tunnel the TV does it with its own filter, and the intensity between the pairs depends on that filter. With IPT it's done once, before the conversion, and every TV receives the same intensity for every pixel. P and T come from the co-sited pixel rather than an average of the pair, so they carry the chroma sample that is there and nothing mixed in from its neighbour; YBLOD reports the same from captures of licensed Amlogic players. A picture that has to be scaled (a 1080p one) is scaled first, in the composer's YCbCr, from 4:2:0 straight to the 4:2:2 of the frame, and converted after that.

    Measured as the bridge draws it on a software renderer, on 14 P7 FEL frames: against a float64 run of the same chain, never more than 1 code of 4096 off on any sample (0.58% of the I samples, 3.62% of P and 0.97% of T are 1 code off, from float arithmetic). Against the composed picture converted with its chroma interpolated in float, the co-sited samples are within 1 code and the ones between them within 4. The only bigger gaps are at hard colour edges, where the float interpolation rings past the range of codes and ours, in integers, is clamped to it. Profile 5 is already IPT in the file and keeps the same bytes as before. More in how it works.

    Vertox Thanks for the details. The Iris Xe test is what pins this down.

    Hades prints that line when neither of its two readers, ours and libdisplay-info, finds a Dolby Vision block in the EDID the driver gave it. If the G6 were offering only Low-Latency, the message would say so (you're right, it isn't game mode), and a block that libdisplay-info reads but our rule turns down gets a message of its own.

    The same RC5 on the Iris Xe read a Dolby Vision Standard block from the same G6. Same code, same TV: the EDID that reaches Kodi on the 5090 is not the one that reaches it on the mini PC. To see exactly where the block goes missing I need the EDID and the kernel log from both machines, and the diagnostics have both:

    • Tick "Save diagnostics there" in the installer when you update (on a USB drive you can also rename DIAG-OFF.TXT to DIAG-ON.TXT on its LIBREELEC partition).
    • Start Hades, play a Dolby Vision file, wait five minutes and turn the PC off from its menu.
    • Attach the hades-diag folder. On a USB drive it's on the LIBREELEC partition; on an internal disk, use LibreELEC settings, System, "Copy the diagnostics to a USB drive". Passwords, keys and addresses are removed before anything is written, and the README.txt inside says what each part is.

    From the mini PC too, if you can: putting the two EDIDs side by side shows the difference straight away.

    Damn, this is really impressive work! Been looking for something like this for a while now. I’m going to buy an AMD computer with 780M/890M and run this on my LG C5.

    Any plans for Linux 7.4? Since that support HDMI 2.1 with VRR, ALLM and 120hz on AMD hardware now?

    My plan is to use the device 80% for Kodi steaming and 20% for gaming via moonlight streaming. Anyway amazing work, can’t wait to test it!