[x86-64][CroqueMr Builds] Dolby Vision w/FEL, HDR10+, and 3D

    Hi ht2tweak,

    Thanks! 😃

    Here in Germany, the HP EliteDesk 705 G4 SFF with Ryzen 5 PRO 2400G is currently available on eBay for just €69!

    Of course, that's a barebone system without RAM, SSD/HDD or power supply, but still an excellent starting point.

    And there's more to my setup:

    • 3D Blu-ray: Native HDMI frame packing works perfectly with the new LibreELEC 13 build and the HP HDMI Flex IO module.
    • 4K UHD Blu-ray drive: I'm using an LG BU40D.
    • DVB-S2 satellite TV: Already working in the same PC using the VDR add-on.
    • 4K playback: Yesterday I tested King Kong in 4K on my Optoma projector, and I was absolutely blown away by the picture quality!
    • Gaming: Batocera also makes these machines great for retro gaming, including PS2 emulation.

    So with this new LibreELEC 13 release, I've finally got an incredibly versatile multimedia PC that combines 3D Blu-ray, 4K playback and DVB-S2 television in one inexpensive machine.

    After experimenting with HTPCs since my first VDR system back in 2004, I'm genuinely impressed by what this little HP can do!

    Many thanks again to the developers for making this possible! 👍

    Quote from Samui67

    Here in Germany, the HP EliteDesk 705 G4 SFF with Ryzen 5 PRO 2400G is currently available on eBay for just €69!

    That's some serious bargain right there. You really should test for Dolby Vision, I suppose many people would be interested in knowing if that machine would be enough.

    Given its GPU capabilities, I suspect it would be perfectly ok.

    Hi ashlar,

    Thanks for your interest! 😃

    Unfortunately, my Optoma UHD50 projector does not support Dolby Vision, so I can't properly test Dolby Vision FEL.

    However, I can confirm that 4K UHD playback works beautifully on my HP EliteDesk 705 G4 SFF with the new LibreELEC 13 build.

    I tested King Kong in 4K yesterday, and the picture quality on my Optoma projector was absolutely stunning!

    The projector correctly recognizes the UHD resolution. Although it supports HDR10, I haven't verified whether HDR10 was actually active during playback.

    Hopefully, someone with a Dolby Vision-capable display can test FEL on the same hardware.

    LibreELEC Hades 1.0 is out

    The first version that is not a release candidate.

    For anyone new here: LibreELEC Hades is an unofficial build of LibreELEC for 64-bit PCs. It sends Dolby Vision from the PC to the TV over HDMI the way Dolby Vision players do, including profile 7 with its full enhancement layer, with HDR10+ and with Dolby Atmos and the other HD sound formats passed through. Everything else LibreELEC does is kept.

    New in 1.0

    • Check this setup (Settings > LibreELEC > System): short test pictures (SDR, HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision 8.1 and 5) and sounds (each speaker, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD) say in plain words what reached the TV, and only the sound formats you heard are switched on.
    • A player information page that a person can read: press O, or the red key of a CEC remote. The first page says in one sentence whether the video plays as intended and, if not, what to do; the details are behind it.
    • A diagnostic report in one file, made with one button, filtered, and copied to a USB drive if you want.
    • Dolby Vision profiles 7 and 8 sent as composed by default, the picture of the composer in the YCbCr of the video, bit for bit. Sending IPT-PQ-c2 stays as an expert choice.
    • HDR mapped more faithfully: the BT.2390 curve with the knee of the ITU-R report (the previous one stays as a choice), HDR10+ adapted by its own metadata, HDR videos played as SDR by choice, and the trims of the colourist off by default for Dolby Vision mapped by Hades itself (native Dolby Vision output is unchanged).
    • HDR above 8 bits where the link would carry RGB at 8: YCbCr 4:2:2 at 12 bits on NVIDIA (on by default) and over HDMI 2.0 on Intel and AMD.
    • DVD films play as films: films in interlaced video are rebuilt and played at 23.976, 25 or 29.97 Hz, and soft telecine at 23.976 Hz.
    • Displays: a display connected while Hades runs is taken without a restart (same graphics card), and only the display in use is lit, with the sound going to it. An expert setting keeps a separate output on for sound, for an AV receiver on its own HDMI output.
    • Dolby Vision on more hardware: the newest Ryzen processors (DCN 4.2 and 4.2B, with a check of the display pipe each time Dolby Vision starts), and passive DP++ adaptors (Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HDMI 3D).
    • Safer by default: Run and Live start with DMA translation, so a device can only reach the memory the kernel gives it, where the computer has an IOMMU.
    • Boot menu at 5 seconds, and the remote control decoders built from source.

    Fixed

    • Films that repeat a pivot in their Dolby Vision metadata stay in Dolby Vision, as the specification allows: the Transformers films used to drop to HDR10 because of it.
    • Picture in step with its sound: on every driver the picture left one refresh before its sound (42 ms at 24 Hz); Hades now measures when each frame reaches the screen.
    • A network drop no longer ends a stream: playback waits, says the connection is interrupted, reconnects and plays on from where it stopped (up to 5 minutes). Stopping a stream whose server does not answer no longer freezes the interface for a minute, and a second video no longer waits for the first or gets lost when the first one fails.
    • Passthrough: a pause keeps TrueHD, DD+, DD and DTS sound, with nothing lost or repeated at the resume; five faults of DTS-HD and TrueHD passthrough are fixed, two of them with fixes by tanio99 (for OSMC) and heit88.
    • Blu-ray: a disc image over the network (HTTP, .strm) opens with its menu, a VC-1 video in a .m2ts opens at its own rate (not twice it), a second seek pressed quickly is no longer lost, and picture subtitles keep their colours.
    • Displays and EDID: the sound no longer jumps to another display when several are connected to an NVIDIA card, and EDID blocks that a display counts are kept when one of them is not valid (Linux and NVIDIA).
    • AMD: HDR10 through a passive DP++ adaptor reached the display as no HDR at all; it now arrives as HDR10.
    • And more: seven fixes of libCEC, JSON-RPC per connection with five fixes of its server, USB disks stopped cleanly at power off, drive labels shared safely by Samba.

    Faster

    • Dolby Vision made from HDR10, HDR10+ and profile 8.1 takes about a third less GPU time per frame: the picture of the decoder goes straight into the transport, the same bytes.
    • Dolby Vision packing costs less while menus or the player information are on screen, with the same bytes, after ideas from the build of CroqueMr.
    • On graphics that cannot keep up, frames with menus over a single-layer Dolby Vision picture are sent converted only where it was measured to help; frames without menus are unchanged.
    • TrueHD comes back sooner after a start or a seek (about 320 ms instead of 680).
    • A Blu-ray image over the network opens faster: half the requests and half the time at 100 ms of latency.

    Up to date
    Linux 7.3.4, LibreELEC master, Kodi 22.0rc2 (Piers branch), NVIDIA 620.70.06 and 580.196.07, Intel microcode 20261110, OpenSSL 4.1 and 3.5. Everything else is in the release notes.

    Tested on hardware
    I tried the final build of 1.0 on my PC: a GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER connected by HDMI to an LG C5 TV, with a TCL Q85H Pro sound bar on the eARC of the TV, and a Samsung Odyssey OLED G6 monitor with HDR10+. These work:

    • Native Dolby Vision of profile 7 with its full enhancement layer (the Transformers films and several others, with Dolby TrueHD and Atmos passed through), profile 5 and profile 8.1, and HDR10 sent as Dolby Vision.
    • The three Tron films, which had dropped out of Dolby Vision before, play in Dolby Vision.
    • An HDR10 film with DTS-HD Master Audio sound.
    • The new player information page.
    • Moving from the LG C5 to the Odyssey monitor and back from the settings, with the display that is not in use turned off.
    • On the Odyssey, which takes HDR10+ and not Dolby Vision: Dolby Vision videos that carry their own HDR10+ go out as HDR10+, and HDR10+ videos go out as HDR10+.


    Not tried on hardware yet, so your results are very welcome: Check this setup, streaming through a network drop, DP++ adaptors, the newest Ryzen processors, 1.0 on AMD and Intel graphics (so far only on NVIDIA), HDR at 12 bits on GeForce GTX 16, RTX 20 and newer, the sound that follows the display in use, and DVD and the Blu-ray changes.

    Download
    LibreELEC Hades 1.0 on GitHub: the image, the update file, the Windows installer and the sources.

    How to update
    Settings, add-ons and diagnostics are kept. With the Windows installer, choose the drive that has Hades and "Update". Or copy the .tar to the Update folder of the drive and restart (over the network: turn Samba on in Settings > LibreELEC > Services, and use the address and password that it shows).
    Before you update:

    • If you had set Audio offset to make up for the picture coming early, set it back to 0.
    • The boot menu now waits 5 seconds (Settings > LibreELEC > System > Boot menu).
    • On Radeon RX 400, RX 500 and Vega cards, Dolby Vision plays as HDR10 unless you turn on System > Display > Dolby Vision on this Radeon (experimental).
    • With several displays on one graphics card, only the one that shows the picture stays on, and the sound goes to it.

    Reporting problems
    Please use the GitHub issues, not LibreELEC or Kodi, and attach a diagnostic report: Settings > LibreELEC > System > Submit Log > Create a diagnostic report makes one file and can copy it to a USB drive. It is filtered, but look through it first.

    Thanks
    This work began in the Dolby Vision fork of LibreELEC by CroqueMr and its contributors, from which the Dolby Vision output of Hades grew. Several features of 1.0 follow ideas from the build of CroqueMr, YBLOD, CorentinB, cinemaONE, SamuriHL, pannal, avdvplus, matthane, malard, damnms and Pro-me3us, written again here. Thanks also to Dom Cobley (popcornmix), cinemaONE, quietvoid, CoreELEC, big-fella and harment, credited one by one in the README, to the LibreELEC and Kodi teams, and to everyone here, on the Kodi forum and on GitHub who reported, asked and tested.

    if your cpu is amd 2400g, then it has the same igpu what i have (cpu 3400g).

    it can play dv fel !!!

    hadesdevls since I didn't see it in the change logs, any chance we can get the quick change menu for the DV conversions?

    I think in Croqs build it is available with a double O tap.

    And a big thank you for the 1.0 release, I will try it out tomorrow.

    Hi hadesdevls I see you copied my DVD-related PR in your build, I don’t care that you use the code or the idea obviously it’s what open source is for but my PR was still WIP, untested. I do think most if not all of it is fine but maybe wait a bit before porting stuff to your build, no need to rush!

    Quote from testmest

    if your cpu is amd 2400g, then it has the same igpu what i have (cpu 3400g).

    it can play dv fel !!!

    It's not a question if the Chopset can play FEL, it's if the fact he's using a module for HDMI, which converts DP to HDMI, will it work over the module is what we'd like to know

    Quote from Khazar

    hadesdevls since I didn't see it in the change logs, any chance we can get the quick change menu for the DV conversions?

    I think in Croqs build it is available with a double O tap.

    There is a "Change output for this video" button in the player process window (O key), but I can't seem to activate it using the keyboard or the Yatse app. I can only seem to reach it using a mouse.

    But there is also a change video output button in the default Estuary skin that is delivered with this build which does work.

    hadesdevls Happy to report that the video stuttering I experienced with the Avatar 2 ISO is no longer present in 1.0.

    Quote from CorentinB

    Hi hadesdevls I see you copied my DVD-related PR in your build, I don’t care that you use the code or the idea obviously it’s what open source is for but my PR was still WIP, untested. I do think most if not all of it is fine but maybe wait a bit before porting stuff to your build, no need to rush!

    I honestly think each build should have a separate discussion. If there is not going to be a merge of the effort or until there is one, I would find it much easier to follow on just the build that I install.

    I don't know the mods usernames, so I don't know who to tag about this. I'll maybe report this message of mine.

    Using projectors mainly... an XGIMI Titan Noir Max and an XGIMI Aura 3 Max. Settings for these builds mostly default, other than for 3D w/Preferred and Same as Movie, which I show in my YT videos.

    CroqueMr Since you mentioned that you prefer your issues and logs over on github i created an issue over there with a log attached. Might not have seen your answer to my first message, so if my hardware is not of interest for you to consider supporting i sincerely apologise for the additional clutter.

    Hi CroqueMr,

    I tested the new release on my **Intel Arc B570** setup (connected via Denon AVR-X2800H to Sony A80K OLED):

    1. **Profile 7 FEL Mid-Stream Resume Causing Continuous Frame Skips:**
    - Starting a Profile 7 FEL movie from `00:00:00` plays smoothly with `0` dropped and `0` skipped frames.
    - However, selecting **Resume** mid-movie causes playback to stutter every alternate second, and the Player Info (`O`) overlay confirms it is rapidly accumulating **Skipped** frames (not Dropped frames), indicating an A/V clock / PTS desync between the dual-layer VAAPI decoders and the audio stream upon mid-file re-entry.
    - Confirmed this happens identically on both **local files** and network streams.
    - Debug log reproducing the local FEL resume frame-skipping:

    https://paste.libreelec.tv/moralless-alycia.log



    2. **HDR10 & Video Stop:**
    - [Add note here: e.g., HDR10 playback and stopping video back to GUI no longer crash/hang]