Dolby Vision support

Help and Support Vero V
1

I am very excited about the Vero V as I think it can retire my good old (but lagging) Shield TV as my Kodi player.

The one thing I am missing right now is information regarding Dolby Vision support. Is DV working already or is there an ETA when it will come? As far as I understand the SoC in the Vero V should already support this.

2

As it’s been discussed on the forum on numerous occasions, Dolby Vision will most likely never come to the OSMC platform as it would have serious implications on the open source nature of the devices as well as on features everyone’s used to

What’s being looked into is mapping DV profile 5 (mainly used for streaming) to HDR10 output though - this would allow you to playback those files without messed up colours. There’s no ETA though. Other DV profiles offer HDR10 fallback already.

See here e.g.: Dolby Vision - #19 by sam_nazarko

5

Our plan is to handle transformation of DV to HDR10+/HLG in the future with tonemapping curves.

Sending a direct DV EOTF isn’t planned for Vero V.

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6

Thanks for the quick update. That’s rather unfortunate news as I find DV to be perceptibly superior to HDR10 in my setup. Especially darker scenes are losing details on my calibrated LG G2 when played back with HDR10-only. This can easily be confirmed by playing a UHD BD disc with dark content (such as the House of the Dragon UBD) on a UHD-BD-Player, which allows enabling/disabling Dolby Vision.

Maybe the decision against native DV support can be revised some day as I guess this is a deal-breaker for many users.

OT: I think with Kodi on Windows it might be possible to get DV if you use “WMP” as an external player and install the “Dolby Vision Extensions” from the Microsoft store. So apparently right now Windows boxes (or Android boxes) are the best bet for people seeking DV support.

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7

Our plan is to tonemap the output and give the same picture even on hardware that doesn’t support DV for compatibility purposes.

As the other thread should show you, it hasn’t been a light decision and there has been a lot of thought as well as discussion with Dolby.

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8

Thanks for this, at least you have considered and tried it. I am curious about the actual technical details, or are you under some kind of NDA?

Having closed-source libraries and a closed bootloader should not be a deal-breaker. In fact it could be a selling point if Vero V has it and RPi does not. Or is it more than just that?

9

It’s all been discussed on the forums before in the thread above and a couple of others.

Yes.

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10

To be clear, I’m not an OSMC person, and if it were up to me, I’d like to see DV output too. But Sam and the other OSMC guys have discussed this at some length in other threads, and it’s clear that, to them, it is a deal breaker, and there’s no point in trying to persuade them otherwise. The clue is in the name, really: “OSMC” stands for “Open Source Media Centre”. The whole reason the project even exists is to provide an open source Linux environment for running Kodi. If the only legal ways to implement DV would mean fatally compromising the open source nature of the project then (they feel) why even bother?

11

If you can read and parse the DV P5/P7/P8 metadata on-the-fly (others do like mpv’s libplacebo) you can apply those to HDR10 and build totally compatible HDR10 frames tone-mapped with DV. So no needed any DV licensed element in the chain.

Not saying it’s easy, just It seems It can be done.

12

How far are you with the tone mapping?

I have several DV Rips here and would love to watch them on my new Vero V

Do you know a better streaming client which can play Dolby Vision?

13

My TV plays DV just fine. I have UPnP enabled so I can play DV from the context menu, selecting Play using and my TV from the list. The drawback is having to reach for the TV’s remote but if you just want to sit down and watch a film it works nicely. You may get a blank screen when the stream ends but I can just press Back on the TV remote to get back to OSMC. YMMV.

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14

I opted for a Homatics Box R 4k Plus, which has proper Dolby Vision support in Coreelec. So far I did not regret it.

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15

I think some people may have missed this: [TESTING] IPT colour space conversion

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16

Excellent!
Just ran the testing commands and now all my “purple” files play great!
Thanks for this Sam.

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17

Thanks for the prompt feedback, glad to hear this!

18

New TVs have an option for Dolby Vision for PC.

Could this be used to bring proper Dolby Vision to other devices?

19

Don’t think it’s relevant – but with latest improvements we have some users reporting the tonemapping to be indistinguishable…

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20

A Christmas gift for our users: [TESTING] Vero V: Dolby Vision TV led support - Testing - OSMC Forums

Would appreciate your testing

Sam