[EXPERIMENTAL] CoreELEC 22 · samurihl DV build (20260719091832)

⚠️ EXPERIMENTAL · UNSUPPORTED · USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

This is an unofficial, experimental CoreELEC 22 build. It is NOT an official
CoreELEC release and it is NOT a supported CE22 port. I am not a CoreELEC 22
port maintainer, and I will not be providing support, bug fixes, updates, or
ongoing maintenance for this build.

The only purpose of this build is to give Amlogic AM9 Pro-class users a more
complete Dolby Vision experience than stock CoreELEC 22, by carrying a set of
custom Kodi features I built for my own device. That is the entire scope.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU FLASH ANYTHING

• USE ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is no warranty of any kind, express
  or implied. It may fail to boot, misbehave, break Dolby Vision, or do nothing
  useful on your hardware.
• BACK UP YOUR CURRENT INSTALLATION FIRST. Take a full CoreELEC backup
  (Settings → CoreELEC → Backup) and/or image your existing boot media before
  you install anything from here. Assume you may have to restore it.
• Prefer a SEPARATE SD card or USB stick you can boot from, instead of
  overwriting a working internal (eMMC) install.
• Do NOT report problems with this build to the CoreELEC team or forums.
  This is not their build; it is not their responsibility. Do not ask them to
  support it.
• I am also not offering support. If it breaks, you keep both pieces.

By downloading or using any file in this release you accept all of the above.

Install

• Clean install (recommended): flash the *.img.gz to an SD card or USB with
  balenaEtcher (or the Amlogic USB Burning Tool for eMMC), then boot from it.
• In-place update: copy the *.tar to the /storage/.update folder on an
  existing CoreELEC install and reboot. (Back up first — see above.)
• Verify your download against the SHA256 sums below before flashing.

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What's changed in this update

This is an incremental update to
v22.0-samurihl-20260715110713
(see that release and its predecessors for the standing feature set: VS10 on
non-DV displays, VSVDB override, tone-mapping target controls). The headline
this time is a large rework of Blu-ray disc menu playback.

⚠️ Still experimental and completely unsupported — see the disclaimer above.
Back up your current install before flashing.

Dolby Vision still requires dovi.ko (the CE22 5.15 build) installed on your
device — it is not bundled; install it yourself as on stock CoreELEC 22.

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🧪 Blu-ray disc menus — a big improvement, NOT a finished feature

Disc-menu playback on this build is substantially better than anything CE22 has
done before — but "better" is not "perfect". This code is young, it has been
validated on a handful of discs against a Panasonic UB820 as the reference, and
it will have rough edges on discs we haven't seen. Treat the whole menu stack
as experimental, expect glitches, and please test it hard — wide disc
coverage is exactly what it needs right now.

The menu work is a collaboration with avdvplus

What changed:

• HDMV menu overlays (buttons/highlights) now render and persist. They
  survive the player's internal stream reopens instead of vanishing after the
  first loop.
• Seamless playitem continuation. Menu background loops and multi-playitem
  titles no longer tear down the pipeline at every segment boundary — on the
  discs we tested, boundaries that used to blank/judder every ~24s now play
  through gaplessly.
• Gapless menu loop wraps and instant menu→title jumps, with the running
  decoder kept alive across the jump where formats match (avoids the DV
  re-latch black/toast).
• BD-J (Java) disc menus work on CE22 Requires the aarch64
  tools.jre.zulu addon; note that addon auto-updates can version-drift
  against the image and silently break BD-J.
• Dual-layer disc Dolby Vision (profile 7) fixes: MEL boundary judder fixed
  (stream-mode decode, matching FEL), FEL boundary corruption fixed, and the
  post-rebase "spinner at 100%" wedge on disc MEL fixed.
• A/V sync hardening for the disc flow: playback clock stays continuous
  across the constant stream restarts disc menus cause, passthrough audio gets
  a proper resync settle window, and on panels that silently ignore fractional
  refresh rates the clock now runs on the measured panel rate.
• Reference-player capability registers: the player now reports real
  UHD/DV/HDR10+ capability (PSR25/26/27), real audio capability read from your
  actual HDMI chain (PSR15), and truthful 3D capability (PSR24) — so disc menus
  offer the same options they would on a reference player. E.G. The Spears & Munsil
  UHD benchmark disc now correctly offers its Dolby Vision menus instead of
  claiming your display doesn't support DV.
• Full code review pass over the menu work: several latent bugs found and
  fixed before they reached you (menu graphics leaking into the next thing you
  play, a dead code path in the decoder keep-alive, a clock-rate edge case on
  vblank stalls, leftover debug instrumentation).

Known rough edges (yes, we know)

• FEL discs can show a brief blank at some segment boundaries (decoder resync
  residual), and a single corrupt frame can appear at a full playlist-restart
  reopen. One DV re-latch toast at menu entry is normal.
• VC-1 discs still don't play (endless busy spinner) — known, open.
• 3D Blu-rays (MVC) don't decode — known, open.
• Discs beyond our test set are genuinely untested. Menus are the most
  disc-author-creative corner of the Blu-ray spec; something out there will
  break this.

How to help

Throw your disc library at it: HDMV and BD-J menus, menu navigation, menu→title
jumps, chapter skips, long titles played to the end. When something misbehaves,
grab a debug log of the failure (settings → logging, or
kodi-send --action=ToggleDebug), note the disc title/edition, and report it.
"Menu X worked perfectly" reports are almost as valuable as bug reports.

🔬 Reminder: display testing still wanted

The experimental target-luminance controls from earlier releases still need
eyes on real panels: sweep "VS10 target minimum luminance (reference black)"
on a 4000/10000-nit black-clip pattern via VS10 HDR10 output, compare a
profile 7 FEL title against a DV display, and watch TrueHD/Atmos A/V sync
across a full movie. Please keep the reports coming.

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Install

• Clean install: flash the Generic *.img.gz (SD/USB via balenaEtcher, or the
  Amlogic USB Burning Tool for eMMC).
• Update in place: drop the *.tar in /storage/.update and reboot.
• Verify your download against the SHA256 sums below before flashing.
• On other Amlogic-no boards (Odroid / Khadas / Radxa): use the *.tar update, or
  your board's own image.

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Source

• CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260719091832
• Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260719091832

Checksums (SHA256)

5f6a75ae8e30ae4bc1e6fbb469f0b68b4708b773686baa3e35d29a20705e842d  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260719091832.tar
39f3986e848397d165919683b9f55bc4556c09e436fc03ec6bc07a8f82535612  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260719091832-Generic.img.gz