A few days ago I started noticing some Dolby Vision UHD remuxed titles being “available”. It seems that it’s now possible to remux 4K UHD Dolby Vision titles along with lossless audio into a MP4 container. I haven’t obtained these as yet or tried playing them so not sure if Vero supports this or not.
Will Vero4K+ support playing Dolby Vision titles at some point if it doesn’t already?
The Vero 4K + will never support Dolby Vision.
I can recognise the appeal, but it will never be achievable for users in this hardware revision. I can’t see it being supported with future Vero devices either but want to make it clear that what we sell today doesn’t, and won’t be able to support it to avoid confusion or mis-selling people
Cheers
Sam
Thanks for the quick reply.
The reason being licensing/legal stuff or is it not possibly from a technical standpoint?
Technical perspective: we have everything to do it tomorrow.
Licensing is the problem.
By licensing I’m guessing it’s more than just the licensing fee per unit/device.
If it’s just the fee then there might be some buyers willing to pay more for probably the only device capable of doing DV apart from some hacked Chinese Oppo clone.
There have been some discussion on the forums about this in more detail
Sam
Does it support it in passthrough mode to let the TV or AVR handle the decode ?
No. Dolby Vision is a passthrough format – it is not decoded.
But licensing is needed to be allowed to pass that data through
Wait, can you clarify something for me:
does this apply to dual-layer DoVi as well? For some reason I was under the impression that for dual-layer the player actually does the composing of both layers into one and sends that composed image via HDMI. Is that not the case with dual-layer DoVi?
The packing of the stream is still effectively passthrough, in the same way we demux HD audio and pass it through.
Sam
So the player is not the one doing the composing of dual-layer DoVi? Both layers get packed into one stream for HDMI and the TV combines those two layers for its final picture? Interesting.
So, aside from licensing and legal issues, the only reason all of this doesn’t work is because the TV does not accept DoVi from a non HDCP-device? There must be some other component on the device-side that is needed for DoVi to work. Otherwise there’d be a bunch of cheap chinese boxes that pretend to be HDCP just so they can play DoVi files. Or am I missing something?
You need to add a Dolby IP HW block to the display pipeline.
Is that like a chip on the device/player?
The reason I ask all of this is because I know of one (sort of-)cheap chinese box that can play all types of Dolby Vision (dual-layer in mkv, ISOs, UHD-BDs etc.) and I kind of doubt they buy anything licensed off Dolby. It doesn’t have Kodi though and I don’t want 2 devices in my home theater, so I’m trying to get a feel of how far away any kind of “solution” might be.
Looking at the current UHD releases, DoVi seems to have gained a lot of traction in the past 3 months or so. 50-75% of the releases include Dolby Vision and, unfortunately, they’re usually a significant improvement over the HDR10 base layer, almost like they put their effort into the DoVi grade and then half ass the HDR10 these days. So the lack of DoVi is starting to get really noticable, unfortunately.
You need to license the hardware and verified video platform pathway from Dolby.
Dolby Vision isn’t supported in MKV format and to my knowledge it must be served in an MP4. Are you sure that box is actually outputting a Dolby Vision EOTF?
Sam
Yes, 100%, and it’s gaining quite some traction in a few home theater 4k forums. It pretends to be a UHD-BD player from a certain famous brand, yet it doesn’t even have a disc drive and just works over USB or shared drives in your network. I don’t want to “advertise” another product here, unless you give the ok. Otherwise I can just PM you the name of the device.
Edit: Actually, I’m not sure about DoVi in MKVs. But it definitely works for UHD-BD ISOs or a UHD-BD folder. Just HDR10 in an MKV including Dolby Atmos passthrough etc. works though.
You’re probably referring to the hacked Oppo. That has DV licensed IP and an SoC which implements those blocks.
I’m aware of the jailbroken Oppo but it’s not that. Like I said, it’s a cheapo chinese device without a disc drive. I’m just gonna send you the link via PM.
It’s still an Oppo at the core and same SoC, which is why it works. Perhaps they were purchased at a discounted rate when Oppo stopped production of their player.
We are still talking with Dolby.
@HDRpotato Are you referring to the retailer that sells “clones” of other blu-ray players besides Oppo as well? With a crappy website where you can choose which device you want cloned when placing the order?
If not then I’d be interested in researching more about this player that can play dual layer DoVi files.
Regarding the dual layer DoVi mkv - can you ping me names of couple of releases? Because from what I know MP4 is the container being used for this purpose because of mkv’s limitation regarding two video layers… but I would love to hear more…
If you mean the device I think you mean, it’s basically a knock-off of an Oppo 203 blu ray player - including using a slightly hacked version of actual Oppo firmware - just with the disk drive and one or two HDMI ports removed. It costs three times as much as a Vero 4K+, has known hardware quality-control issues, and probably breaks Intellectual Property laws.
So, you know, caveat emptor.
If that’s the device you mean then its DV playback abilities are the same as an actual Oppo 203, meaning you need a full-disk rip in folder format. It can convert HDR10 M2TS files to DV on the fly but (I think) not extract actual dual-layer DV info from one. In common with a number of cheaper DV-enabled blu ray players it can handle dual-layer DV in MP4 format, but (last I heard, this may have changed) that approach requires you to downgrade the audio to EAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus). There’s no way to get DV out of an MKV file.