Has anyone tried the BBC UHD trial on their Vero 4K?

CaptainT the talented developer of the Iplayerwww addon has kindly released a test version of the addon which includes the BBC’s trial World Cup UHD HLG streams here:-
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=239378&pid=2744135#pid2744135

I was wondering if anyone else has tried it as I can’t get any of the test streams playing on my Vero :frowning:
Although I am fortunate in that my TV’s Iplayer app works well with this trial, but am interested to see how the Vero 4K would handle a UHD HLG stream.

Hi

I’ve been watching it in UHD on my Vero 4K. I didn’t know someone had updated iPlayer to add support for the streams, and I’ve been streaming via a laptop which is a bit hacky.

HLG detection is already in the kernel; but signalling has not been added yet. If you have something like an HDFury Vertex you can manually enable HLG at this time.

We are indeed working on adding HLG support as part of our work on HDR.

Sam

Hi Sam, the UHD trial can be bit flakey at times anyway (to be expected from a trial).
On my 212 meg Virgin Media connection I probably average 3 or 4 times of buffering for a second or two per game.
However the picture quality is so good its worth persevering with.
So as to have no interruptions I might slum it and watch the normal HD channel for the England game later though lol

Yes — it keeps cutting out and I’m on VM’s 152M package. It looks impressive when it works. For the England game I will just stick with HD.

Sam

@sam_nazarko this may well just be coincidence, but I’ve just had an error free whole game in UHD HLG via my iplayer app for the first time since the opening couple of days.
The only difference I can see is that for unimportant reasons my Vero 4K was shutdown.
As I said its probably just coincidence but is there anything the Vero or Kodi might be doing when its not in use to effect my bandwidth? My initial probably ill thought out idea might be the PVR service calling home to the PVR server?
They are also both sharing the same GB switch, but I wouldn’t think that an issue as both devices only have 10/100 ethernet ports.

Nope – if the device isn’t streaming anything, it will be using minuscule amounts of bandwidth (occasionally checking for updates).

Is this using the standard “iPlayer WWW” add on?

You would need unpublished OSMC patches for HLG to be signalled properly.

Sam

Even if it was signalled properly, I cannot get the stream to even attempt to display anything in Kodi.

The fifth BBC UHD stream is the “demo” pre-recorded loop and is always available it seems. The URL is definitely alive, but for me just not working in Kodi 17.6 on the Vero 4k:
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio_video/webcast/dash/uk/full/llnw/uhd_stream_05.mpd

I have the inputstream.adaptive add-on and have tried both the “iplayer www” add-on and a correctly formatted .strm file but neither display anything on the Vero 4K.

I have successfully viewed this .mpd in VLC on other devices so I know it should work, but in Kodi whether I use the add-on or the .strm method I always get a 404 error generated in the Kodi log and it never attempts to display any audio/video.

Can anyone shed any light on this? I think there are 3x separate qualities of stream within the .mpd, the third is the UHD/HLG one, but even the lower quality ones do not appear.

A similar test .mpd file works fine (and if I set in the inputstream.adaptive add-on to manually select the stream, then I can switch between all of them on the fly whilst it’s playing) so the system to playback these kinds of streams is generally working:
http://download.tsi.telecom-paristech.fr/gpac/DASH_CONFORMANCE/TelecomParisTech/mp4-live/mp4-live-mpd-AV-BS.mpd

Can you post a Kodi debug log so we can check add-on version and see what’s going on?

Sam

No problem - I’ve grabbed only the relevant part - let me know if I’ve trimmed too much - there is at least one attempt at playing it there I believe:
http://paste.osmc.io/adijedorih.coffee

FWIW, I did not explicitly install the inputstream.adaptive add-on and I am presumably using one installed with the system (looks like v2.0.20 from the logs).

I’m in the same boat. Running latest official OSMC and beta 2 of the latest iPlayer add-on. Have the stream set to DASH and there are links to UHD streams but nothing plays.

Talk on the Kodi forum for the “iplayer www” add-on suggests that it only works in Kodi v18 - I wonder if that’s correct and/or what is really making it work can be easily backported to OSMC’s 17.6 “stable” release. I don’t really want to risk trying v18 on my Vero 4K until it’s completely stable…

I’m not accessing the streams via iPlayer WWW so I’m not sure if it can be backported to 17.6.

Sam

Neither was I, I gave up with that approach - I had tried creating a .strm file with this in the contents:

#KODIPROP:inputstreamaddon=inputstream.adaptive
#KODIPROP:inputstream.adaptive.manifest_type=mpd
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio_video/webcast/dash/uk/full/llnw/uhd_stream_05.mpd

…and playing that via “Files”.

I believe this then should be using the inputstream.adaptive addon somehow?

Would be nice to see if it even works at all - like I said, that other demo .mpd I posted earlier works fine, so OSMC (v17.6) is capable to display a DASH adaptive stream in some way.

I just didn’t know why the 404 errors were appearing in the logs for the content within the .mpd - the exact .mpd works on a PC running VLC…and for others on the Kodi forum who are using Leia.

HLG works and we basically just send an infoframe to activate it. I’ll try and get the core support in for next month, but there are some other priorities at the moment.

Managed to get the BBC UHD trial working after updating to Kodi 18, however cannot get frame-rate switching to work for absolutely any source file, regardless of its native frame-rate, whether it be a file or playing back live TV via another device on my network that hosts TV Headend. Powered down everything, no joy. So heading back to 17.6, will check out 18 again when it’s settled down. The “white list” in the display settings shows a correct list for my receiver/TV, but simply will not switch frame rate (I’ve checked all the obvious settings). Oh well.

This landed recently and still needs some tinkering with I think

Sam

I’m running a Leia Nightly on my Vero 4K - and the iPlayer UHD HDR streams are playing either via WWW iPlayer or using .strm files with the correct URLs. Initially they play fine, but when I stop and play them again they appear to be very juddery?

However I notice that the video is being output flagged as Rec 709 not Rec 2020. This is in 2160p50 YCbCr 444 8 bit at the moment as I’ve not done the 10 bit changes yet.

However it looks to me as if this is Rec 2020 being output flagged as Rec 709, rather than Rec 2020 being converted to Rec 709?

For others following the dialogue, I’ve replied to Steve here: 4K HDR10 - State of Play - important media player limitations - LAST UPDATE sept 2020.

Sam