Dolby Vision

As you know, we’ve discussed Dolby Vision and licensing details here for a long time.

Dolby demand that hardware is licensed with royalties paid. We found some of these licensing terms to be significantly imposing and restrictive of our goal to be an open source media player. Dolby are also very involved in evaluating and testing that the implementation of Dolby Vision is correct. This would have been tested on the Homatics box under the Android TV environment rather than under CE. While the efforts by CE are impressive, I’m not sure there will be a significant number of ‘open’ devices that have Dolby Vision and allow another distribution like CoreELEC to be booted. I’m not sure of the exact licensing terms but suspect that Google require Android TV devices to have a secure, verified bootloader which could prevent booting other operating systems.

We have been looking at supporting the ICtCp colourspace which is used in DV profile 5 streams. It seems to be a priority for most users rather than the difference between DV and the underlying compatibility stream (as @JackMikkers, @Numiah has noted above). This gets rid of the green and purple picture when there is no fallback layer. Ultimately we would wish to bring a DV-like experience to non DV displays which would be at least as good as CE’s solution for such displays.

We don’t always do things first but we tend to do them right

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