[x86-64][hadesdevls Builds] LibreELEC Hades - native Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and 3D

    Very nice release, can't wait to test it this Friday when my SSD USB-stick arrives.

    Hopefully I can follow the installation instructions, haven't dealt with Linux in a decade. :D

    Quote from Khazar

    Very nice release, can't wait to test it this Friday when my SSD USB-stick arrives.

    Hopefully I can follow the installation instructions, haven't dealt with Linux in a decade. :D

    Khazar thanks! You won't need to know any Linux for it: once it starts, all you see is Kodi. The easy way is the installer for Windows: on the release page, download LibreELEC-Hades-Installer.exe and the .img.gz (with its .sha256) into the same folder and double-click the installer. Windows warns twice because the installer has no paid signature: "More info" and "Run anyway", then allow it to make changes. Pick your USB SSD, type the word it asks for, and it writes the image and reads it back to check it. If you'd rather prepare the drive on a Mac or another system, any program that writes disk images takes the .img.gz as it is (balenaEtcher, for example).

    Then restart the PC, open the boot menu (F8 on ASUS, F11 on MSI and ASRock, F12 on Gigabyte and most laptops) and choose the UEFI entry of the SSD. The first start prepares the drive and restarts once by itself. Secure Boot has to be off. If anything looks wrong, tick "Save diagnostics" in the installer and the logs stay on the drive, ready to attach to an issue. Have fun on Friday.

    hcliec001 thanks, much appreciated! If you give RC4 a try, I'd like to hear how it goes on your setup.

    Hi hadesdevls, thanks for the new release.

    I was reading that croquemr's build doesn't support lldv while yours has the option and i have been using it for the last weeks. Your lldv implementation is similar to what we would get from a dedicated media box?

    Like another user was saying, my gaming pc is next to my home theater. After i stopped using the nvidia shield tube, i came across this thread and now i dont feel the need of buying another media player. But if a dedicated media player will always do a better job regarding lldv on local files i would consider getting one.

    Quote from hadesdevls

    LibreELEC Hades 1.0 RC4 is out:
    https://github.com/hadesdevls/Lib…es/tag/v1.0-rc4

    Haha, two new releases on the same day! What a nice surprise! 😄

    Big thanks to you too, hadesdevls! It's great to see how much progress you're making with this project, especially with NVIDIA support and FEL playback.

    I'll definitely be giving RC4 a try as well, particularly on my PC RTX 5090 and Mini PC with Intel Iris Xe graphics. Really curious to see how everything performs with the latest improvements.

    Much respect to both you and CroqueMr for all the time and effort you're putting into these builds. It's great to have two excellent projects to test and enjoy.

    Keep up the great work. :thumbup:

    Quote from Vertox

    Haha, two new releases on the same day! What a nice surprise! 😄

    Big thanks to you too, hadesdevls! It's great to see how much progress you're making with this project, especially with NVIDIA support and FEL playback.

    I'll definitely be giving RC4 a try as well, particularly on my PC RTX 5090 and Mini PC with Intel Iris Xe graphics. Really curious to see how everything performs with the latest improvements.

    Much respect to both you and CroqueMr for all the time and effort you're putting into these builds. It's great to have two excellent projects to test and enjoy.

    Keep up the great work. :thumbup:

    Vertox thanks a lot! An RTX 5090 and an Iris Xe mini PC are a great pair to try it on, they cover both ends. If anything looks off, tick "Save diagnostics" in the installer and attach the hades-diag folder to an issue; it already filters out personal details.

    One heads-up for the mini PC: if its TV takes HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision, leave "Send it as HDR10+" off for now. On Intel at 4K 23.976 it falls back to HDR10, and the fix comes in the next version.

    Quote from hadesdevls

    Khazar thanks! You won't need to know any Linux for it: once it starts, all you see is Kodi. The easy way is the installer for Windows: on the release page, download LibreELEC-Hades-Installer.exe and the .img.gz (with its .sha256) into the same folder and double-click the installer. Windows warns twice because the installer has no paid signature: "More info" and "Run anyway", then allow it to make changes. Pick your USB SSD, type the word it asks for, and it writes the image and reads it back to check it. If you'd rather prepare the drive on a Mac or another system, any program that writes disk images takes the .img.gz as it is (balenaEtcher, for example).

    Then restart the PC, open the boot menu (F8 on ASUS, F11 on MSI and ASRock, F12 on Gigabyte and most laptops) and choose the UEFI entry of the SSD. The first start prepares the drive and restarts once by itself. Secure Boot has to be off. If anything looks wrong, tick "Save diagnostics" in the installer and the logs stay on the drive, ready to attach to an issue. Have fun on Friday.

    hcliec001 thanks, much appreciated! If you give RC4 a try, I'd like to hear how it goes on your setup.

    Oh nice that sounds pretty straightforward, thanks for info!

    Even as an USB OS it should have no problem reading another external NVME SSD on an USB-C port for the video files right?

    Quote from hadesdevls

    Vertox thanks a lot! An RTX 5090 and an Iris Xe mini PC are a great pair to try it on, they cover both ends. If anything looks off, tick "Save diagnostics" in the installer and attach the hades-diag folder to an issue; it already filters out personal details.

    One heads-up for the mini PC: if its TV takes HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision, leave "Send it as HDR10+" off for now. On Intel at 4K 23.976 it falls back to HDR10, and the fix comes in the next version.

    Thanks for the heads-up. Just to let you know, my display is an LG G6, so it natively supports Dolby Vision and isn't limited to HDR10+ only. I'll make sure to attach the hades-diag logs if anything acts up. Keep up the awesome work:thumbup:

    Thanks CroqueMr and hadesdevls for your awesome work on that. One thing that seems to fail on both releases is bluetooth connecting and disconneting all the time. My Nvidia SHIELD 2019 Remote works without configuring or remap anything which is great but it disconnet and connect, my bet is, old drivers, I can provide logs.

    Quote from siriusbox

    Thanks CroqueMr and hadesdevls for your awesome work on that. One thing that seems to fail on both releases is bluetooth connecting and disconneting all the time. My Nvidia SHIELD 2019 Remote works without configuring or remap anything which is great but it disconnet and connect, my bet is, old drivers, I can provide logs.

    siriusbox thanks! Logs would help a lot, and 1.0 RC4 is the version to take them with: it writes to kodi.log why each Bluetooth device disconnected (its key, the radio, the remote itself, or the standby timer), and the diagnostics keep a bluetooth.txt. Tick "Save diagnostics" in the installer when you update, use the remote until it drops a few times, then shut down from Kodi's menu and attach the hades-diag folder to an issue on GitHub. Bluetooth addresses and device names become markers, so nothing personal goes out. What the log says is described here: https://github.com/hadesdevls/Lib…cs/bluetooth.md

    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.