Forcing HDR / Dolby Vision when not supported

 I came across VideoProcessor.org through a thread on AVSForums. From their own description, this sounded like something that might be of use for me to see how far I could push HDR on my venerable JVC X500 projector;

VideoProcessor turns a computer into a 4k HDR capable live video processor by connecting a video capture card to a renderer and taking care of details such as conversion, timing and HDR metadata.

This allows advanced renderers to do things like 3D LUT, HDR tone mapping, scaling, deinterlacing and much more which can significantly improve image quality on most displays and beamers.

It turned into quite the adventure, and when I finally got it working, I thought I'd write up the settings for posterity....

Maybe the best gadget I've ever bought?

 

Fairly insidiously, Amazon has taken over my house.  I now have various iterations of FireTVs connected to each TV, and almost every room has an echo device.

I'm not complaining really, these are great pieces of technology, and voice control is a lot more useful that I would have envisaged a few years ago. 

And the FireTV is excellent - easy to use and supports everything I use on a regular basis; Netflix, Kodi, Spotify, Emby Amazon Video and more. However, there's one thing that' been bugging me -  it's lack of true bit-streaming of extended sound formats. I use Kodi quite a bit for my media library, and there are many titles in there with fancy surround formats that just don't make it out to my AV system unscathed.

This is only an issue in my Home Cinema which has a full 7.1.4 system that can make best use of such soundtracks (everywhere else is plain old stereo).

I've been reading about the nVidia Shield for a while and finally bought one to see if it could replace the FireTV in this room. Here's how I got on with it...

The Grand Plan

Welcome to Mediaserver8, a place where I document my adventures in home automation and media serving - mostly for my own reference and future sanity!

I'm going to keep this post on top and maintain the overview schematic at Gliffy to offer an introduction to my HA system as it evolves. (Here's a direct link to a scalable version of this diagram).

Card

Read on for a detailed breakdown of this setup...

I'm on Fire

I've had an Amazon account since the early naughties and do most of my online purchases there. This was brought home to me this week when I signed in to Amazon Music for the first time and found that it populated itself with all of the CDs I'd purchased over the past 15 years. In all that time, however, I've only been dipping my toes into the Amazon world.

I recently acquired an  Echo Dot and signed up for a developer account in order to write skills for it. For some reason, this has magically indoctrinated me into the Amazon way and I'm turning into the biggest fanboy.

Over roughly the same period, I've been trying to find the ideal whole-house entertainment system. I've built more HTPCs than you could shake a stick at and have tried all the back-ends there are from SageTV to my current fav., a TVHeadEnd/EMBY combo. However, there's always been at least one shortcoming in anything I've tried.

With my new Prime account, I thought I'd try an Amazon FireTV device - just to see, I ordred a FireTV and plugged it in to the living room set, replacing a Gigabyte Brix HTPC. I installed Kodi and a FLIRC for IR control and started playing.

Constant Image Height Projection - No Zooming

Having replaced my trusty old Sony 1271QM CRT projector with a shiny new JVC X500R digital model, I wanted to display a range of movie formats on my 139" Seymour AT based DIY 2.35:1 aspect screen with minimum of fuss.

Typically, this is achieved either by using a costly and cumbersome anamorphic lens or by setting up lens memories on the projector which are recalled manually based on the input resolution.

The Pursuit of Happiness

It’s been a long and winding road but I’m finally getting to a point where I have a software and hardware infrastructure that’s robust flexible and meets my main requirements.

Principally, I’m after a whole-house a/v solution that facilitates multi-room viewing and listening with a simple interface that supports the following;

• Live TV viewing with PVR capabilities
• Centralised media storage & database (maintain one library centrally)
• Multi-device & OS client support – mixed Windows & OSX environment

Not too difficult, surely? Well, I’ve been through a bunch of front ends and back ends and middleware and have ended up with what’s for me a fine and usable system, albeit with a few minor niggles.

KODI – The Heart of It All

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Kodi over the years. Until recently, the main factor preventing me using it was the inferior video quality – especially noticeable on LiveTV showing sports. For this reason, I’ve been using MediaPortal which had an infinitely better video image.

Somewhere in recent releases, however, this has been fixed and video quality is now on a par with anything else I’ve tried.

Plus it’s just great software. Very configurable, a bunch of skins and UI variants, constant updates and a great support community. Plus it runs on Windows, OSX, Linux and pretty much anything you want and has LiveTV and Optical Disc support. It ticks a lot of boxes for me.

The one issue I have with it though is the local database infrastructure. Each client needs to configure it’s own library and there’s no sharing of watched status etc. (it is possible to set up a shared central database bit it’s messy, poorly documented and not fully supported).

Step Up Emby

Emby is a super centralised media management server with DLNA serving, a multitude of clients and, critically, a great Kodi plug-in.

I use the central Emby server to manage my media and install the plug-in on Kodi clients. There’s a bit of configuring with paths and settings to get it all working but once up and running, it’s pretty transparent in that it just integrates right into the Kodi media libraries.

Streaming Services?

Support for Spotify is provided in Kodi via the Spotlight plug-in. It’s limited in features (very little management, but does the job of providing access to pre-configured playlists and allows Spotify music to be streamed through the Kodi UI.

But what about TV?

So Kodi clients all around and centralised, easily managed media management. But what about PVR? I haven’t quite cut the cord fully yet and we watch a good deal of TV in our house, both digital terrestrial and satellite.

For tuning and management, I’ve set up ArgusTV on a server and use the PVR capabilities in Kodi to provide a front end meaning I’ve got access to all my local music, movies and Live TV in a single unified interface with great image quality and configurable UI.

And Control?

Well, most of my clients support IR control and a standard MCE profile on a Logitech remote provides basic functionality. I also run the official Kodi remote app on iOS and that provides a nice UI to all of the above.

There’s got to be a catch, right?

Well, yes, a few things are sub-optimal;

The main bugbear is that while ArgusTV supports series recording, access to this is not officially supported in Koid front-end. It’s possible to set up a timer to record an individual show but to configure ArgusTV to record the full show, this must be done through it’s own Web UI or on the server. A bit of an inconvenience.

There’s also an issue with music album cover art in the Emby Plugin. All my tracks are tagged with art and a lot of albums show up with art in the Emby plugin, though some don’t and I can’t figure out why, even though all the tracks on the album show covers when I drill down. A puzzle for sure.

Netflix is a pain in that it doesn’t integrate well with kodi and the windows App doesn’t support remot controls so either keyboard control is required r use of the embedded version in TVs or players is required.

Apart from that, there’s not a lot I have to complain about. Just this week my 11 year old – used to the ‘TV’ changing on a regular basis, came to me and said ‘this one works well’. Success, of a sort!

A note on Hardware

This system is enabled by a beefy unRAID server which looks after all the media storage and runs a few Virtual Machines;

Windows 7 ‘TVServer’ VM

A headless Windiws 7 VM that runs ArgusTV and Emby servers. There’s 6x Digital Devices tuners passed through that provide all the TV inputs.

Widows 8 HTPCs

Two Win 8.1 VMs run Kodi and have GPUs passed through. These connect via HDMI to two of my TVs

Additionally, I have a couple of Gigabyte Brix system that are hooked up to TVs in places where I can’t run cHDMI able from the server. These are also configured with Kodi clients.

I also have an OPPO 103 Blu-Ray player that can access all the media on the network and a couple of Macs with Kodi.

Launching MediaBrowser and Netflix from Mediaportal

Since the MediaBrowser plug-in for Mediaportal has stalled and is now pretty much unusable, I've been spending my weekend looking at ways to get MediaPortal to launch external applications like MediaBrowser Theater and Netflix.

The MultiShortcut plugin for MediaPortal works well for the former - you can set it up as a tile on the MediaPortal home screen that, when clicked, launches MediaBrowser Theater and hides MP, bringing MP back to life when MediaBrowser is shut down.

This gets around the issues with using the MediaBrowser plug-in and seems to work pretty well. MediaBrowser Theater also supports remote control so it feels well integrated.

Netflix, on the other hand is a bit more challenging.

It's a Windows Store App so there's no obvious way to make a shortcut or find an .exe to launch from MultiShorcut. A quick search, however, revealed this easy process to make a shortcut for an App which I was able to use to construct the MultiShortcut exefile and arguments strings required. Here's the resulting settings for my system;

There's still no way that I can find to control the Netflix App with a remote control so it'll be necessary to pick up a keyboard or mouse for that task but this is close to good overall.