Various issues with vero 4k+: no HDR, deep colour, frame packed 3D & CEC

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
5

Hey tried the upload functionality but it didn’t work.

Did all kind of things and then it gave back this URL: https://paste.osmc.tv/ < html >
Then tried store on SD card, but no file appeared there either.

Finally snatched it from the .kodi directory, but cannot upload it here.

Any ideas?

Note that i did switch on component specific logging on the audio/video/CEC libs, maybe that was overkill? Log file is only 4MB though…

6

You need to reboot. We only accept logs that are <10MB.

Please follow the instructions for uploading logs (we need all logs – not component specific).

Cheers

7

Do not do this. Simply enable debug. Reboot twice to clear old logs and try again.

8

Rebooted twice as instructed and also switched on the normal logs, but I guess a bit too ambitious with the additional logging. Will try again :slight_smile:

P.S. Thanks for the awesome fast replies btw!

9

That did the trick: https://paste.osmc.tv/uxupohiqig

Played various content 4k hdr, 3d frame packed & old scool 720p. Connected through the AVR.

Note that with the debug logging on it doesn’t look like it is switching refresh rate, which usually takes a long time with my projector.

I will now do the same with the vero connected directly to the projector.

10

When connected to your AVR, the EDID is not being parsed at all.
There is a known issue affecting a few devices from getting a good EDID read using the 4.9 kernel. The 3.14 (stable) kernel is not affected. On 4.9, we fixed most of them, but a couple remain. I’m still looking in to the issue.

I’d suggest trying with a direct connection to the projector.
When you do this, be sure to reboot the system after changing the HDMI so there is full propagation of the EDID changes to userland, kernel and Kodi.

11

And here is the second log: https://paste.osmc.tv/vijidatohi

This one the vero is connected directly to the projector. First I played the videos on 0-255 range, then switched to 16-240 range. I observe the following:

In general

  • The refresh rate changes from the projector (logging info disappearing for a few seconds)

0-255 mode:

  • 4k hdr: oversaturated
  • 3D frame packed: just playing normal, projector refuses to switch to 3D, indicates it is 2D content
  • 1080p: looks ok I guess
  • 720p: gray bars above & below, but video itself goes to deep black.

16-240 mode;

  • 4k hdr: way oversaturated
  • 3D frame packed: just playing normal, projector refuses to switch to 3D, indicates it is 2D content
  • 1080p: looks great
  • 720p: black bars above & below, and video itself goes to deep black as well
12

(Uptime = 572.60)

Looks like you didn’t reboot when you changed the HDMI over. Can you try doing so?

13

Sorry – I’ve just looked at this.

The EDID issue you are experiencing won’t be related to a problem with the 4.9 test builds, because you aren’t running them.

You don’t have the 3D build installed either, which is why this isn’t working.
There are improvements to 4K HDR in the 4.9 build.

I would suggest installing the 4.9 build. See [TESTING] Linux 4.9 kernel and improved video stack for Vero 4K / 4K +. Until you do this, 3D MVC will never work.

A report back after doing this with a list of issues will then be useful.

14

Will do, I remember updating to 4.9 before, but I now realize that was probably cleared when I had to reinstall from scratch. Be right back :slight_smile:

15

Here is the log after the 4.9 kernel upgrade: https://paste.osmc.tv/aholefeteg, vero 4k+ directly connected to the projector.

Let’s start with the good news, projector switches over on 3D frame packed content! Awesome!
Another time I will check if Atmos also still comes through, but this is already very promising.

What actually got worse is full HDMI range (0-255). While the main menu looks great, during video playback it goes wrong. On all content formats (720p-4k hdr) the blacks are now gray and washed out, whites lackluster. It seems the video decoder simply ignores this setting now, yet my projector picks up the wider range.

On normal range (16-240) the 720p & 1080p look great, but HDR content is still not good and lacks brightness. Colors seem a bit better but not great and still too saturated. Worst offender is Lego batman, which is extremely saturated. What I also notice is that the whole menu system, subtitles & log messages are gray while playing video, instead of white in the main menu system. Text is also white during 1080p/720p content.

Hopefully the logs show something and let me know if there is something you want me to try. I will go to bed now though, since it is 4am over here… :yawning_face:

Thanks for the help so far & to be continued :slight_smile:

P.S. The uptime is long because I tried various files and hdmi range settings in one go.

16

Hi,

Not had a chance to look at the logs fully yet. It is also late here.

Do you have another display to test with (that supports HDR) where you could see if colours look more sane on that?

Keep in mind that your Epson projector supports HDMI1.3 and it’s not advertising support for HDR. You will only be able to get HDR tonemapped to SDR on this device., unless this EDID reading is wrong and you are using a much newer projector.

Sam

17

Edited below after looking at some more content.

Hi Sam,

No worries, no hurries :wink:

You are correct, it is indeed an SDR projector, but seems to have some kind of deep color support (either 10 or 12 bit I believe), which should at least help in reducing banding.

For HDR content, tonemapping is indeed what I expect to happen. Not sure what type of mapping is used? Colors still seem a bit over saturated to me, but are already way better than in the previous version, where you could see red/green colors in people’s faces, that is mostly gone now.

Also banding is greatly reduced, e.g. on the Disney logo, and is barely visible now.

Initially I thought HDR didn’t have brightness, but that was incorrect, it is there for sure. It is very content dependent and I was misinterpreting some things on the screen. Some of the log text brightness decrease was actually because the auto-iris of the projector was cutting down overall brightness for dark scenes, which usually you don’t notice. Now it just became obvious because of the debug text changing in brightness.

Note that for very bright content (e.g. Sing) I did notice the subtitles etc getting dark gray, but I guess that is a feature and not a defect?

The 0-255 handling seems like a clear bug though somewhere, especially since it clearly changed between the two versions. Hopefully an easy fix.

Good night & I will dig deeper tomorrow if I can find the time :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Marijn

18

Interesting that you report you didn’t have the issue with older 3D builds.

Older builds were based on the 3.14 kernel. We haven’t changed how we handle HDR to SDR processing in 3.14. So if it worked before on that kernel I’m sure we can get it working well again.

4.9 is still a work in progress. Ideally that’s where we want to fix things for you.

19

Thanks for the detailed reports. It might be helpful to set out what should happen.

  • There should be no advantage/disadvantage in using full-range quantisation if your display supports both but limited is best. For HDR, full-range is forbidden anyway. Many displays don’t support full-range except when fed a RGB signal so you would get distortions if you try to send YCC full-range to them. I think there are bugs with full-range in the latest 4.9 release which we’re looking into but AFAIK limited range works correctly on all SD, HD and UHD material so please stick to that.
  • As you say, deep colour does not mean HDR. For HDR there is a different colourspace and transfer characteristic. If your beamer (or AVR if it’s between Vero and beamer) doesn’t advertise HDR/UHD support we convert HDR to SDR. We are working on adding some user settings to adjust the curves used to support different screen brightnesses.
  • On-screen text like Kodi’s debug stuff top left and subtitles confuse the automatic smarts of a display so when a subtitle comes up, an lcd display (for example) thinks the scene is brighter and can turn up the backlight. Your auto-iris must do something similar. This is annoying but not much we can do about it, except to remove the Kodi debug display, you can put this in ~/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml:
<advancedsettings>
        <loglevel>1</loglevel>
        <debug>
                <showloginfo>false</showloginfo>
        </debug>
</advancedsettings>

This sets debug logging on permanently which shouldn’t affect normal use. But best to remove that after any issues are resolved.

3-D and CEC aren’t my department.

24

Hi Sam & Graham,

Thanks for the info! Much appreciated and another step closer :slight_smile:

I finally had time to do some more testing, this time through my AVR. Some findings:

  • It could not find the right resolution, and dropped back to 1280x720 max.
    • I did have a copy of the disp_cap, so copied that one as per this thread:
      Any way to persist HDMI edid data?
      With this I could switch to 1920x1080.
    • Note that before (older build), I did not have this problem. Maybe something changed in the EDID handshake towards the AVR?
  • Color on 4k HDR still seems off to me, maybe a wrong color space with different primaries? It feels a bit like PAL signal on NTSC color space if you know what I mean.
  • 3D playback is broken with the above disp_cap tweak. The projector does switch to 3D mode, but it shows me 2 halves on top of each other, with the bottom of each half corrupted. A bit like an half-OU video, but then with the bottom parts corrupted for each of the halves.
  • Finally I tried force RGB, but this did not make any difference in color rendering. (Note I stayed on 16-240 limited range all the time as recommended above). This indicates to me it is on the HDR->SDR conversion side, and not related to YCbCr vs YUV or something.
  • CEC seems to work top-down if you know what I mean. So with my projector remote I can actually control both my amplifier volume and the vero 4k menu. The other way around does not work, the vero volume control just changes the volume inside osmc.

This leaves me with the following questions:

  • Any more info on the HDR->SDR tone mapping?
    • Could it be that my SDR deep color does something funky with the colourspace?
    • The fact that my menus & subtitles become gray, is that supposed to happen?
  • Any idea on why the EDID comes back empty through the AVR?
    • As a workaround, is there any more in-depth way to just use the EDID from the projector so that it also works with frame packed 3D?
  • Any ideas on the CEC volume bottom up?
  • And last but not least, anything you want me to specifically test / log / etc?
    • For example, is there a good test set in 1080p, 4k SDR, 4k HDR 10bit, 12bit, etc that I can compare? I saw different resolutions of big buck bunny, but no mention of SDR/HDR or bit depths.

Thanks!
Marijn

25

Yes – I’m aware of a small, but still suggests a wider problem, issue that needs fixing re. EDID parsing in 4.9.

There’s also a disp_cap_3d which you might need to copy over.

If the EDID isn’t being parsed properly, CEC is probably broken as well.

Can you show some photos of the colour issues as best as you can so we can try and get a better understanding. This might help me answer some more of your questions

Cheers

Sam

26

Ok cool, let me know if there is anything you want me to test if you have a potential fix

Thanks! I also bumped into that over here, will try it out:

Sure thing, I can try to make some pictures. Would be good to have a file I could use that you are familiar with. Anything with a face in a dark setting will do I think. I will also try to see if I can get 1080p and 4k versions of the same shot to compare.

If it fails with my phone i could try with my SLR on manual mode and auto iris off, but won’t have time to set that up anywhere soon.

During weekdays very busy with work and kids, but will post here if I have an update.

Thx!

27

I had this as well on my Epson 5050. I found out it’s related to an old version of a (popular software tool) I had used when I processed my blu’s to mkv long ago. I’m sure you can figure out what tool without me saying it. I know it sounds crazy but you might check that. If you have any newer mkv try those. I had to redo all my old 3d blu’s with a much newer version of that software and they all work now. There’s a certain version where they fixed some mvc processing, think it was around version 1.10.

Oh, I also had a lot of mvc files I needed to set the video stereo mode to = 13 with mkv tool as older versions of that software mentioned above also didn’t tag the headers with that info. And of course rename all my files to be compliant with how kodi wants to see them (.3d.).

1 Like
28

Thanks, I will double check that as well!