⚠️ 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-20260808164352
(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 audio sync fix, for DTS soundtracks, plus the diagnostic that found it.

⚠️ 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.

🔊 DTS soundtracks could end up permanently out of sync — especially after a pause

The symptom. On a DTS or DTS‑HD Master Audio title, the sound could sit slightly
out of step with the picture and simply stay there. Pausing and resuming could make it
worse, and doing that a few times over an evening made it worse again, each time. A
seek would often snap it back into place, which made the whole thing feel random.
Nothing showed up in Kodi's own debug statistics — by every number the player could
report, audio and video were in sync.

What was wrong. Every time the audio device is (re)opened — at the start of a
title, and again on resume if the pause was long enough for the device to be released —
Kodi re‑aligns the soundtrack against the picture. That alignment stops as soon as it
is within 30 milliseconds and declares itself finished.

For normal (decoded) audio that is harmless: Kodi keeps gently correcting afterwards,
so the leftover error quietly disappears. But a bitstreamed soundtrack — DTS,
Dolby, anything sent untouched to your receiver — cannot be nudged like that. Whatever
offset the alignment leaves behind is permanent. And the player's own safety net does
not catch it either: that net has to ignore anything under 50 ms, because correcting
smaller errors would make the picture visibly stutter.

So the leftover error landed in a blind spot. Up to 30 ms of lip‑sync error could be
created every single time the audio device opened, nothing would ever correct it, and
no number Kodi displays would show it. Measured on a Ugoos AM9 Pro, three
pause/resume cycles on one film shifted the sound by 49, 14 and 13 ms — always in the
same direction, so the error piled up until it grew large enough to trip the safety
net and jump the picture by a whole frame.

The fix stops the alignment settling for "close enough" on bitstreamed audio. It
now keeps working down to the finest step it is actually capable of — one audio frame,
about 16 ms for DTS — instead of the flat 30 ms. After the change, the same three
pause/resume cycles shifted the sound by 4.5, 0.5 and 7.3 ms, in both directions,
so nothing accumulates, and a 40‑minute unbroken viewing needed no sync corrections at
all.

What this does and does not change. Only DTS‑family soundtracks behave
differently; Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD already used the finest
step available to them and are bit‑for‑bit unchanged, as is all decoded (PCM) audio.
The measurements above were taken on DTS‑HD MA; DTS core and DTS‑HD use the same audio
frame size and therefore the same corrected behaviour.

Two related notes. Resuming from a pause now also re‑arms the settling period the
player already uses after any audio restart, so a correction can no longer be taken
while the sound is still being re‑aligned. And a long‑suspected "slow drift" on DTS
titles was measured over 40 uninterrupted minutes and does not exist — picture and
sound stay locked together; what looked like drift was a harmless internal measurement
that cycles up and down and never approaches the point where anything acts on it.

🔍 Under the hood: audio sync is now visible in the log

Kodi records the audio/video error it acts on only at the instant it corrects
something. Any error too small to be corrected — exactly the case above — left no
trace at all, which is why this took so long to find.

This build writes that figure to the log once a second whenever audio debug logging is
enabled. It changes nothing about playback, and costs nothing unless you turn debug
logging on. If you ever report a sync problem, the log will now contain the number that
matters instead of silence.

Source

• CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260809151125
• Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260809151125

Checksums (SHA256)

41137884ee0a7f0bf8dc8b90473ef4889cd9d7080576e608ff9fde0822730c7b  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260809151125.tar
ed32aa17ab81a2326dd5c45bb4e35d9d6fb9680ab1fc44fbb4fc175b25da9b2c  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260809151125-Generic.img.gz