Following Kodi’s recommended system video settings
I set Display resolution 1920x1080p (2D) @60p and
I left Display/ -Whitelist empty and for
Player/Videos/Adjust display refresh rate’ I set “On start/stop”, HDR processing: Auto etc.
Now if I play an UHD movie the output resolution automatically jumps to the expected 3840x2160 which is good, but only at 24p which is not good at all, for without the use of whitelist you simply can not adjust the frequency from 24p to 60p, which is automatically selected by Kodi when I playback from a win PC.
If I use whitelist than the proper resolution and refresh rate can be opted for but only manually, no automatic selection will take place. Unfortunately using the whitelist option also mean 3D playback is impossible.
I know switching between these settings is really not a big deal but not too elegant either. Is there any other way to circumvent these problems?
But most 4k material is 24p so that is what you want.
Well it should automatically select the ‘best’ resolution and refreshrate.
I’m also confused as to why you’d want to do that. Unless it’s actually a 4K/60fps video (Gemini Man, say) I think it’s the PC that’s getting it wrong. You want the output refresh rate to match the frame rate of the video.
I think you may have gotten a bit mixed up with your testing. With a whitelist and refresh rate switching turned on it does the same (technically similar, but that’s a tangent) automatic refresh rate and resolution selection as without. However if you manually set it to something else then Kodi stores the playback mode in the database for that video and when you go to play it back again it will use that instead of the auto selection.
With no whitelisted resolutions 3D should work flawlessly, if you’ve selected the preferred 3D output according to this: https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/Player/Videos#Playback_mode_of_stereoscopic_videos
That definitely isn’t true (unless it’s a very recently introduced bug). I use a whitelist and watch a lot of 3D.
“Well it should automatically select the ‘best’ resolution and refreshrate.”
As for resolution it works perfectly, as for refreshrate if i am wrong (along with windows solutions) and there is no point to select 60p for a movie that is just 24p, then the selection of the proper refresh rate is also OK. For the time being I cannot tell if it looks any better with 60p, I just got used to it from windows.
I confirm that (apart from my HD audio passthrough problem) but I am afraid you should select between whitelist and 3D playback, at least I was unable to get 3D playback untill I deleted all items on my whitelist. Luckily if angry.sardine is right than this is not the case and I made some mystake.
When you enable white-listing, you are effectively saying: “I know better than Kodi and the Adjust Refresh Rate option (which also switches resolution), or I know what I’m doing”. You are overriding the choices we would normally make on your behalf during playback.
Did you whitelist the 3D modes? 3D modes can now be configured manually in the whitelist I believe (CC @tanio99).
If you didn’t, it’s not a surprise that you don’t get put in to a 3D mode.
I am not sure why you need a whitelist – unless you have specific reasons. Otherwise you should have an empty whitelist and Adjust Refresh Rate enabled.
Whitelist means only allow these modes. If you omit some, we won’t switch to them, because we assume that you made a conscious decision to prohibit them.
I would be more than happy if I could keep my whitelist settings and 3D playback as well!
First question: why do you need a whitelist?
Second question: have you whitelisted 3D modes?
You are right there is no point to have whitelist if 24p is the perfect choice for a 24p video, which I assume is the case and windows handles it wrong when adjusting it to 60p.
As a matter of fact I selected all the possible 3D resolutions to my whitelist, but had no luck. I may have to repeat that test, but if the answer to the first question is 24p, than no need for whitelist and no need for a 3D and whitelist coexistence test either.
That would explain a lot, although it is highly unlikely that I have set low resolution to UHD movies manually …, I have always opted to higher resolution manually when automatic adjustment did not made it for some reason.
But if higher than the actual refresh rate of a movie is out the question I will not use whitelist anymore and without whitelist automatic resolution adjusment works fine for me.
It may have gotten lost in the shuffle but in the first response Grahamh linked to a rather detailed howto that angry.sardine wrote about whitelists and related topics. It may be a bit of a chore to process it all but you should find that it can answer a lot of questions that are getting touched on in this thread.
As for your doubt or whatever you want to call it about the frame rate and how it should be played, what is right is whatever looks best to you. Having said that if you have a video that is showing a fixed number of frames per second and you have a display set such that it is showing only these same frames then you are seeing it as the creator intended. If there is a mismatch outside of an even multiple (ie 25fps source on a 50hz display so each frame just gets displayed twice) then something sitting between the source and your eyeballs is making something up or screwing with the timing (ie doubling some frames but not others). To a purest this is bad, to some they prefer the so called soap opera effect. OSMC is fully capable of automatically switching to either preference.
Thanks for enlightning the very nature of this issue.
As I wrote earlier I just got used to the highest possible refresh rate regardless of that of the movie played. Windows based media players works like that i.e. presumably with the soap opera effect. What i saw was that from windows the very same movie goes to my projector or TV at 4K 60p whereas from OSMC at 4K 24p.
Well, so far I have not found out how to do that automatically.
If i do not use whitelist, than automatic rate adjustment sets the resolution of a 4K 24p movie at the start of the playback to 4K 24p, and there is no way to force it to 4K 60p. Thus the only way in OSMC to get a 4K 24p movie to be played back at 4K 60p is using whitelist option including that resolution and switching to it manually.
For once you use whitelist option, there shall be no automatic resolution and refresh rate adjustment regardless of any other settings either in system video or in player videos. So if your base system video setting is 1980x1080p 60 Hz - as it is recomended - and you play an UHD video, it will definitely be played at 1980x1080p 60 Hz, instead of at 3840x2160p @60 or as a minimum at 3840x2160p @24 Hz. Once again it is you, who have to select higher resolution and higher refresh rate. At least that is what i have experienced so far and that is why I created this topic.
If you have your UI set to 1080p 60hz and set a whitelist of only 4K @ 50, 59.94, and 60hz then if you playback a 4K 23.976 fps file at 4k 59.94hz automatically. But your right that if you only have 4K@60hz in your whitelist it will output 1080p 60hz. I guess that one slipped past or wasn’t considered with the current logic.
But just for the record I’m not advocating for outputting like this. If someone wanted everything to get that effect they would probably be better off still outputting the correct frame rate and turn on whatever sports/smoothing/[insert random BS hype word here] they have available on their display that performs the same function. I think there are a lot of TV’s out there now that will actually manipulate it up to 120hz in these kinds of modes.
What is your suggestion then?
To output to as close to native framerate as possible. I’m firmly in the camp that hates judder and the soap opera effect. I personally don’t use a whitelist and have my boxes setup the same as our recommendations we have posted all over this site. A whitelist is also fine given that the person using it understands exactly how to set it up, why, and the pros and cons. I can get a bit better picture quality for some content when I set my boxes up that way, I just don’t give that a higher preference personally over other factors.
In most cases there are two main reasons for using a whitelist. One is that it allows native resolution output for videos whose dimensions are smaller than the UI resolution (e.g. 720p, 576p/i, 480p/i) - otherwise those will be upscaled to 1080p by the player, and then (if you have a 4K TV) upscaled again to 4K by the TV. The other reason is that, without a whitelist, the output mode only changes if there’s an output mode that exactly matches the video resolution; so, for example, without a whitelist a 2560x1440 video will be downscaled to 1080p, but with a whitelist it can be upscaled to 2160p.
If neither of those sound useful, you quite likely don’t need a whitelist.
Regardless of whether you use a whitelist, I agree with DarwinDesign that you will get more visually pleasing results by having the output refresh rate match the video frame rate - so if the film is 23.98fps, you want the output to be 23.98Hz. Converting 23.98fps to 59.94Hz introduces judder (though not usually SOE).
Have you ever experienced that, I mean soap opera effect and stuff like that?
The reason I am asking this is because I have never ever seen any such thing using windows-like solutions to this problem, i.e. converting every UHD video up to 4K 60p.