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[EXPERIMENTAL] CoreELEC 22 · samurihl DV build (20260804163650)

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@SamuriHL SamuriHL released this 04 Aug 20:54
· 409 commits to samurihl-ce22 since this release
v22.0-samurihl-20260804163650
553d75d

⚠️ 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.

What's changed in this update

This is an incremental update to
v22.0-samurihl-20260803202836
(see that release and its predecessors for the standing feature set: Blu‑ray disc
menus, HDR10+ → Dolby Vision conversion, DV → HDR10 that stays in HDR10, FEL
profile‑7 reconstruction on non‑DV displays, VS10 output on non‑DV displays, VSVDB
override, tone‑mapping target controls).

One Dolby Vision playback fix, one renderer fix, and a rebase onto current
upstream CoreELEC 22.

⚠️ 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.
You do not need to modify it — this build corrects it automatically at boot.

🎬 Some Dolby Vision files played no video at all, then crashed Kodi

The symptom. Certain Dolby Vision files — typically .mp4 — showed a black
screen with audio playing, no picture at all, and after a few minutes Kodi vanished
and restarted. Nothing in the Kodi log looked like a decode failure.

What was wrong. A Dolby Vision disc rip can carry its picture in two video
tracks: a base layer and an enhancement layer that are merged during playback. The
player decided a file was one of those two‑track titles by looking at the position
of the video track in the file. That works when video comes first, which it usually
does — but some encoders put the audio track first. In that case a perfectly
ordinary single‑track Dolby Vision file was mistaken for half of a two‑track pair, and
every frame was set aside to wait for a partner frame that did not exist. No picture
was ever produced, and the discarded frames piled up in memory until the system killed
Kodi to reclaim it — roughly 450 MB every 33 seconds on a 4K60 file.

The fix identifies the base layer as the first video track rather than trusting
its position among all tracks, so an audio‑first file is no longer misread. Three
related problems were fixed at the same time:

  • The same mistaken assumption was used to write Dolby Vision settings onto "the first
    track", which on an audio‑first file meant writing them onto the audio track.
  • A stale two‑track flag could carry over between titles, which could leave a
    following non‑DV title with its only video track discarded — no picture.
  • The frame queue is now capped. If frames ever fail to pair again for any reason, the
    result is degraded playback and a log message rather than Kodi being killed.

Dolby Vision playback was re‑tested end to end after this change: profile 5, profile
8.1, profile 7 single‑track, profile 7 FEL, HDR10+ → DV conversion, plus Spears &
Munsil, Halo, TNG and Superman discs. Two‑track FEL merging is byte‑for‑byte identical
to before the change.

🖼️ Renderer: a video timing correction could leave dropped‑frame handling stuck on

The symptom. Subtle and hard to spot: after certain audio/video sync corrections,
the picture became more prone to visible frame skips for the rest of playback, with no
obvious trigger.

What was wrong. The renderer keeps a "how late are we" counter that makes it skip
frames more aggressively when playback is genuinely struggling. Past a threshold, the
test it used to measure lateness became the same test it used to decide to skip —
so every frame counted as late and the counter could never fall back. One sync
correction was enough to enter that state, and the renderer's tolerance for a normal
hiccup stayed halved from then on.

The fix measures lateness against the fixed window while leaving the
skip‑aggressively behaviour untouched, so the counter recovers once playback catches up.

🔄 Rebased onto current upstream CoreELEC 22

This build picks up roughly 590 upstream commits. Two things had to be repaired to make
that build at all, both worth noting because neither was caused by changes in this fork:

  • A CoreELEC patch no longer applied — upstream Kodi moved the DVD libraries from one
    build system to another, so the patch's target no longer existed.
  • Upstream's Amlogic screenshot code had not been updated for a rendering change made
    some 400 commits earlier and no longer compiled. It has been adapted here.
    Screenshots on this build are compile‑fixed but not otherwise tested.

Known limitations

  • On a long title you may still see the picture step by one frame, roughly once every
    half hour.     This is expected, and stock CoreELEC and CE21 builds do it too — your
    box's video clock and your AVR/TV's audio clock are separate crystals that drift
    apart, and with a bitstreamed soundtrack the audio cannot be stretched to absorb it.
  • Dolby Vision requires dovi.ko, which is not bundled. Install it as you would on
    stock CoreELEC 22; this build corrects it at boot without modifying your copy.
  • If you are coming from the previous release and replaced dovi.ko over a network
    share while it was running, that copy may have silently reverted on reboot — check
    its hash and re‑copy if needed. This build no longer has that behaviour.
  • The Dolby Vision reboot fix applies to boxes running this build's kernel. Other
    CE22 builds carrying the same module have the same underlying issue.

Source

  • CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260804163650
  • Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260804163650

Checksums (SHA256)

d4dd3f724acd2c97b720ab0293560a6c742ee9e0c6327513a04235a20b9b15e3  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260804163650.tar
22dbd9a0433a65810878f3df9e659cb601fb25086537d64bc8ae872f42305571  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260804163650-Generic.img.gz
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