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....

Solving HDMI Long Run Dropout

My Sky TV box feeds three displays throughout the house; a JVC projector in the Home Theatre, a Panasonic 58DX800 in one living room and a Samsung 7 Series TV in another All are more or less 4k , (the JVC is a Faux-K unit), but all support UHD resolution, which the Sky box outputs.

I don't see much value in the additional multi-room subscription for Sky as we really don't use more than one TV at a time, and on the odd occasions we do, we can run the Sky app on a playstation or other device.

So the challenge is how to route the signal to each device. All are reasonably proximate to the Sky box with runs from 7M for the projector to 15M for the two TVs.

I have the system set up as follows;

 The SkyQ box feeds an HDMI Splitter via a single HDMI cable. This serves 2 key functions; It allows me route to the 3 devices, but also strips HDCP, without which my JVC won't display an image.

One splitter output has a run of 20M Fibre 4K cable direct to the Panasonic TV, while the other goes to the Marantz AV8805 Cab/Sat input, to connect to the JVC projector as needed (Zone 1) and permanently routed to the Samsung TV (Zone 2)

This mostly works, except that the HDMI connection to the Panasonic TV is unstable, (red arrow above).. From time to time there are merge visual artefacts (green lines), some audio drop-out and fairly frequent re-syncs where the screen blanks and resets, resulting in a 1-2 second interruption.

I'm on my second or maybe third cable and thought that this Fibre version would resolve the problem, but unfortunately not. I've also tried all sorts of configurations including testing direct cable connection between the SkyQ box and the TV, but the problem always exists. Some combination of this TV model and the cable run length is problematic.

Before considering purchase of an expensive 8K Fibre cable, I thought I'd try HDMI over ethernet as I had a spare AVAccess HDBaseT extender kit I'm not using. The configuration now looks like this;

And this works perfectly. The AVAccess devices are rated at 4K60Hz over 40M Cat5e, which is more than enough for my needs. Been watching UHD content all through the day without any hiccups so, problem solved!

I've written before about these devices for routing virtual computers, but they really are very flexible pieces of kit. If you're having trouble with lengthy HDMI runs, you could do worse than look at this solution.

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...

Total Harmony

It was getting quite ridiculous. This is the set of remotes I had built up to control my HT. From right to left; Receiver, NowTV box, PVR, FireTV, BluRay, Projector, Squeezebox, DAC.

It's little wonder no-one else in the family used the system!

In the past, I'd used various Logitech Harmony remotes but all had outlived their usefulness and have been retired. A few months ago, I'd picked up a Harmony Companion set on Amazon warehouse for a steal, but hadn't got around to configuring it all until now.

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...

The TV selection challenge

It's time for a new TV. Our main TV is an 8 year old Sony Bravia 40" and while it's still perfectly serviceable, it is showing it's age in terms of picture quality and features. We now have an XBox One S and Fire TV HD attached and so have multiple 4K sources (UHD Blu-Ray, Netflix and Amazon). The time seems right to take the plunge with 4k and HDR.

I didn't think this would be so difficult.

It started easily enough - figure out a panel size and a budget. Initially I figured a 50" would be a great improvement and would be pocket-friendly as well as prices increase somewhat when going from 50" to 55". To be sure, we borrowed a 55" set for a few days to confirm that it would be too big for the room. It wasn't. It was perfect and, even though it was only a HD set (Panasonic DS500), the improvement in quality over the old Sony was astounding.

Why Emby's not for me

I so want to like Emby. I use the server as a lynchpin of my whole-house a/v system, integrating it with Kodi front ends where it provides excellent media management and serving. I've recently starting using Amazon FireTV devices as clients and, while it's possible to sideload Kodi on these devices, it's not a seamless process and there's always a question mark over how long it will be tolerated on that platform.

Emby client looks like it might be a viable alternative. It's a natural fit with the server and it's a fully-fledged member of the app community with a presence in all the relevant app stores. Plus, the recent addition of LiveTV support makes it worth having a look at. LiveTV is a big part of my system and PVR is a significant part of  the way we use TVC in our house. There's a TvHeadEnd instance running on the network that manages 6x terrestrial/satellite tuners with channels accessed through Kodi TV plugins.

Of course, TvHeadEnd is not an officially integrated TV backend for Emby, like NextPVR or MediaPortal. There is a community plug-in though so it should work OK. I tried it in the web browser instance and eventually managed to get a picture so thought I'd try the dedicated client. This turned out to be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons;

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.

Bi-Amping with Marantz NR-1506

Over the past 18 months, a secondary system has been evolving in our family room. We don't always feel like firing up the Home Theatre, especially during the summer, or for sports where the projector is not as good as an actual TV.

I have an old 40" Sony Bravia HDTV in there, along with a pair of B&W CDM-1NT speakers and a REL Q200E subwoofer.

We only use stereo in this room, with the system used about equally 1/3 TV watching, 1/3 movies and 1/3 music listening. Sources are a Gigabyte Brix HTPC running Kodi and used occasionally for Netflix as well as an eir Vision IPTV box (this is part of our home phone/broadband package from eir and is essentially a belt & braces second TV source just in case anything goes wrong with whole house TV via TVHeadend and Kodi).

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.