It’s been another year, and we’re now happy to announce support for Dolby Vison FEL CM2.9 and V4.0 TV led playback. Blog post pending. First: we need some further testing.
Run the following command to add the staging repository: echo 'deb http://apt.osmc.tv bullseye-devel main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osmc-devel.list
Go to My OSMC → Updater → Manual Controls → and select Check for Updates now. When prompted to do so on screen, please choose to install the update.
Your system should have have received the update.
I also recommend you remove /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osmc-devel.list after updating.
This will deactivate the staging repository. You can do so with the following command: sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osmc-devel.list.
Please note that we will automatically disable this update channel after 14 days on your device in case you forget to do so to ensure that your system reverts to the stable update channel.
Thank you
Thanks to the OSMC developers that implemented this. Tremendous work against all odds. 2026 is going to be a fun year!
Thanks to the testers that have been giving us constant feedback since November. Your feedback has been immensely helpful and apologies for the blips that I caused with builds sometimes
Just a quick test on my side, I was interested in trying it with a particular movie that I knew could be problematic, and that has indeed been the case. It’s John Carpenter’s Vampires, I can confirm seek playback problems: the image freezes for a few seconds while the sound continues in the background.
Another issue that this movie already had, and that I thought would be fixed with FEL support, is that some scenes suffer from flashes, like brightness spikes, which are very annoying and do not occur if I disable Dolby Vision. I have a Hisense PX1 Pro projector, and so far this has only happened with that movie. I can’t confirm it on other devices either.
Then I tested some more FEL titles and they don’t seem to have seeking problems, but something curious does happen: the frame momentarily freezes and becomes visibly oversaturated. For me it’s not really a problem because it only lasts an instant and playback continues correctly afterwards, but it’s still noticeable.
I can provide a sample clip from the movie if necessary.
All of the movies I have tested played back well and I did not notice any issue on general playback so far.
The only problem I encountered was while seeking as well. When seeking to any random point in movies with Dolby Vision FEL, the screen will get much brighter for a small moment, plus sometimes the picture gets blocky artifacts. It disappears as soon as the movie continues to play.
Movies without FEL or Profile 5 don’t get brighter while seeking, instead they sometimes just have glitchy or blocky artifacts on the screen.
These problems don’t affect normal playback though and only appear for a brief moment. After the seeking is finished, playback was stable. I was able to reproduce them on all Dolby Vison files I tested.
Thanks everyone for their hard work on this update and I am glad to see it working so well!
I also interested in L5. I asked about that some months ago, I saw a video https://youtu.be/HyrA3KmcJBU?t=472, sometimes I would say that some movies with DV look washed, and it makes sense if the tone mapping is considering black bars to calculate the whole thing. What’s the reason to not pass L5, are there any drawbacks if you do?
In early testing, we had a clip from, IIRC, Mission Impossible III which had L5. The top and bottom of the picture were cut off and so was the OSD. So we just disabled L5. I think that clip was badly ripped - whoever made it should have removed the L5. But there must be a lot more rips with a similar problem. There hasn’t been an outcry so we haven’t revisited that decision.
L5 should not affect tonemapping for the video itself. It’s the L1 values and the trims which determine the tonemap.
Yeah, L5 doesn’t impact tone mapping as far as I know. But it can cause major issues with subtitles and the OSD so the safest option for the majority of use cases is to ignore L5.
I like options so an option to enable or disable L5 would be nice.
I’ve installed the test version, and I encountered an interesting issue last night.
Watching Top Gun Maverick (full disclosure: from a “questionable” source), when the playback started black levels were raised (clearly seen in the black bars and text on black screen section), colours were washed out and in general a little odd, and if I brought up the menu during playback the menu item colours were messed up too. The interesting thing is that if I seeked forward by 10 seconds or anything at all, everything locked into place and all those problems disappeared. I reproduced this behaviour twice, and once it locked in everything looked fantastic.
Apart from that I have the raised levels during seek that others are seeing, but I’ve also had just general instability. I saw the sad face a few times last night and had the Vero reboot. In fairness I’m using Arctic Fuse 2 skin with the aforementioned questionable add-on so there are a lot of variables here, but I don’t normally encounter the sad face.
Not sure if this is helpful, but I thought I’d report.
<redacted for now, I’ll come back to it later> is the log. Feel free to delete it if not allowed.
The problem reoccurred, I let it play for 20 or 30 seconds to be sure, moved ahead 10 seconds which solved the picture problem, then I stopped the playback after another 10 or 20 seconds.
Tested and no problems here with that movie. I also tried JCs Vampires from a different source and no flashes or seeking problems appears, probably bad rip.
