[HowTo] Guide to the Kodi whitelist function and related settings

Okay, I’ve expanded section 6 considerably, and turned it into a general discussion about the “Display 4:3 Videos as” setting rather than making it specific to the Pi.

Looks good :+1:t2:

I don’t see what is highlighted and what not… In standard skin all modes are in white letters, when I click a mode it becomes blue. What is the active one?

Blue is active, grey is not. (I’ll amend the text to make that clear!)

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On reflection… I’m not sure this is a good idea. If other people wish to take over authorship of the piece, I’m perfectly okay with that; but I’m not sure that the article really works if you only read isolated sections of it. I divided it up into collapsible pieces mostly just to make it easier to identify a section when there is a cross-reference to it from elsewhere in the document. I think most readers ought to read, or at least skim, the whole thing the first time they read it.

What do other people think about that…?

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Another question: I have my Vero 4K+ attached to my Marantz SR6011 and have both a projector (JVC X7900) and an OLED TV (LG 55C7) connected. Both are 4k capable. I assume I will get different modes to select in Kodi depending on which screen is active. Am I correct in this? And will Kodi remember the different settings for both displays?

I always use 50hz because I don’t want the TV to re-handshake every time I go to my TV tuner.
The difference between 50hz & 60hz on the gui is minimal.

I would assume the resolutions and refresh rates available for both displays would be pretty similar, although all bets are off with LG Tvs, they are a law unto themselves…
I would set the whitelist to whatever modes are available to both displays to reduce the risk of handshake errors when switching between them.

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Possibly. It depends on the EDID information that the Marantz sends back to the Vero. The Marantz itself may not be able to handle some modes that the displays can, for example.

I doubt it, but I wouldn’t like to say for sure.

Why not try it and let us know what happens? :slightly_smiling_face:

The projector probably supports 4096x2160 modes, while the TV quite likely doesn’t.

different settings for both displays

I suspect that in this case it would be easy enough to put together a whitelist of modes that both displays support. But when this isn’t the case (e.g. you have a 4K TV and a 1080p projector) is using Kodi profiles the solution?

There is only one whitelist, but Kodi doesn’t re-write it when you switch displays. So if 4k60 is whitelisted when you are connected to a 4k display, if you switch to a 1080p display it won’t be visible, but it will still be there when you switch back to the 4k display.

It is not possible to whitelist a mode for one display and not for another if both displays support that mode.

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Probably good advice but it shouldn’t be necessary. When hdmi gets a hotplug event, we re-read the EDID and select a desktop mode that the new display supports. So for example if my GUI is 1080p and I switch to an old HD-Ready screen that doesn’t do 1080p it switches desktop to 1080i.

And before you say it; no you can’t whitelist interlaced modes but that’s another story.

@grahamh If you somehow have a mode whitelisted that is not included in the display’s EDID, will Kodi still try to switch to it? For example if you set up the whitelist with one display, then switch to another without revising the whitelist.

I’ve not seen that happen.

Hmm. Just playing around with this a little, and I’m not sure Kodi is paying as much attention to the EDID as it should be.

With standard EDID if I runcat /sys/class/amhdmitx/amhdmitx0/disp_cap then I get

480p60hz
576p50hz
720p50hz
720p60hz
1080p24hz
1080p25hz
1080i50hz
1080p50hz
1080i60hz
1080p60hz*
2160p30hz
2160p24hz
2160p25hz
2160p30hz
2160p50hz
2160p60hz
smpte24hz
smpte25hz
smpte50hz
smpte60hz

If I hack around a little with the EDID (blocking everything above 1080p) and then run that command again then I get

480p60hz
576p50hz
720p50hz
720p60hz
1080p24hz
1080p25hz
1080i50hz
1080p50hz
1080i60hz
1080p60hz*

So, something somewhere has detected the fact that the EDID has changed.

But if I go into Settings>System>Display and edit the whitelist, it’s still offering me 2160p modes. And if I play a video which is 2160p/24 10-bit HDR, it still cheerfully switches the output to 2160p/24 10-bit 444 regardless.

If I actually reboot the Vero 4K, then everything works the way it should: the 4K video is downscaled to 1080p when it’s played, and the whitelist doesn’t offer 2160p modes.

Looks it may not be handling a hot-plug event in quite the way it should.

EDIT: I’m still running the 4.9 test build at the moment, so that could be having an impact.

The only way to know for sure would be to do some testing and see what is happening by reading debug logs. I would suspect that your AVR is probably not sending a hotplug event which would force a rescan of supported resolutions (assuming HPD lock is not enabled in Kodi), but rather is reprocessing the video signal if there is a mismatch between your input and output device. If for some reason you don’t see a setting you know is supported it is possible to make a custom EDID that will dictate what can be output irrespective of what your AVR and/or TV reports as supported (as hinted at in section 8).

The command you used just reads that file. Your “something, somewhere” is you just literally telling cat to print the contents of the file before and after you edited it. The hotplug event is triggered by the loss of signal on a specific pin which I don’t see where you said you actually made this happen before the reboot. If your going to override in Kodi with a disp_cap file that would require a reboot of Kodi to take effect.

I didn’t edit the file at all. I didn’t edit anything on the Vero 4K. I use a Lumagen video processor which allows limited control over the video EDID it reports on its inputs. Changing the processor’s EDID causes the Vero 4K to spontaneously change the contents of that file without me editing anything, so it has clearly picked up the EDID change via HDMI.

I’m not doing that either.

Indeed. Hotplugging on 4.9 needs some work in Kodi.

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