Vero V: rotated HEVC phone videos play sideways (cause found + workaround add-on)

[E8YTHMyqekV9QJCC_te]

Rotated iPhone videos (HEVC, 90/180/270 in the tkhd matrix) play sideways or upside down on my Vero V with amcodec enabled. H.264 rotated videos play fine. Disabling amcodec fixes the orientation but stutters. Same issue as this thread and this one.

Setup: Vero V, vero5-mediacenter-osmc 21.3.0-7, kernel 4.9.269-93-osmc.

Cause

1. setVideoRect only writes the manual orientation (m_orientation) to /sys/class/ppmgr/orientation, never video_rotation_degree. The rotation only reaches the decoder via gcodec.param, which the H.264 decoder honours and the HEVC one ignores.
2. HEVC frames come out compressed (amvdec_h265 mmu_enable=1), and ppmgr does not rotate them.

With double_write_mode=1 on amvdec_h265 and the stream rotation (0-3) written to ppmgr/orientation, the video plays upright and smooth. Tested with 90, 180 and 270 clips.

Possible fix in the vero5 patch

• Write (m_orientation + video_rotation_degree) % 4 to ppmgr/orientation.
• Enable double write for HEVC streams with a rotation.

Workaround meanwhile

I published a small service add-on that does both: GitHub - juanmaguitar/service.vero.rotation: Kodi service add-on for OSMC Vero: plays rotated HEVC phone videos upright · GitHub (install from zip). One open question: it keeps double_write_mode=1 for all HEVC playback. Could that hurt 4K HDR / DV playback? Happy to test builds.

[thansen_dk]

Thank you, that fixes playback of my videos recorded on my Android phone.
It would be nice to have the fix in the official OSMC build

[grahamh]

Excellent! IIRC this hasn’t worked since we went from kernel 3.14 to 4.9. And iPhone footage was worse than Android. I’ll give it a test.

[jb2cool]

The rotation does now work for me for some DJI OSMO Action videos that I have but it seems a bit pixelated or moire or something, not really sure how to explain it. Good effort getting it working though.

[ahmad638]

@E8YTHMyqekV9QJCC_te

Rotated iPhone videos (HEVC, 90/180/270 in the tkhd matrix) play sideways or upside down on my Vero V with amcodec enabled. H.264 rotated videos play fine. Disabling amcodec fixes the orientation but stutters. Same issue as this thread and this one.

Setup: Vero V, vero5-mediacenter-osmc 21.3.0-7, kernel 4.9.269-93-osmc.

Cause

1. setVideoRect only writes the manual orientation (m_orientation) to /sys/class/ppmgr/orientation, never video_rotation_degree. The rotation only reaches the decoder via gcodec.param, which the H.264 decoder honours and the HEVC one ignores.
2. HEVC frames come out compressed (amvdec_h265 mmu_enable=1), and ppmgr does not rotate them.

With double_write_mode=1 on amvdec_h265 and the stream rotation (0-3) written to ppmgr/orientation, the video plays upright and smooth. Tested with 90, 180 and 270 clips.

Possible fix in the vero5 patch

• Write (m_orientation + video_rotation_degree) % 4 to ppmgr/orientation.
• Enable double write for HEVC streams with a rotation.

Workaround meanwhile

I published a small service add-on that does both: GitHub - juanmaguitar/service.vero.rotation: Kodi service add-on for OSMC Vero: plays rotated HEVC phone videos upright · GitHub Minecraft gratis (install from zip). One open question: it keeps double_write_mode=1 for all HEVC playback. Could that hurt 4K HDR / DV playback? Happy to test builds.

Nice find! This fixes the rotated HEVC issue without the stutter. Would be good to know if double_write_mode=1 causes any issues with 4K HDR or DV.