⚠️ 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-20260824170247
(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, disc‑stated menu detection and episode
lists).

Said plainly up front: there is no new feature work from this build in this
release. Everything below comes from upstream Kodi 22 and CoreELEC 22, brought
in by a rebase onto their trees as of 26 August 2026. What this build adds is
the work of keeping our Dolby Vision and Blu‑ray fixes intact on top of the newer
upstream code — which this round meant defending three of them against upstream
changes that landed in the same functions.

If you are running the previous release and it is behaving, this is a low‑urgency
update whose main draw is upstream's HDMI hotplug rework, two new playback
settings, and a batch of OS‑level security and package updates.

⚠️ 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.

📺 Upstream: HDMI hotplug handling reworked

The largest single block of new upstream work is a rework of how the Amlogic
windowing code reacts to the HDMI connector appearing and disappearing —
unplugging a cable, power‑cycling an AVR, or a display that drops off the wire
while Kodi is running.

Hotplug events are now handled on Kodi's main thread through the normal message
pump rather than from inside the udev callback, the connector state is refreshed
after a recovery, rendering is suppressed while HDMI is disconnected instead of
drawing into nothing, and the display's HDR capabilities are re‑read when the
display changes rather than only at startup.

One honest caveat specific to this build: upstream's recovery leans on forcing
a full display mode reset. This build deliberately does not allow a forced
reset when the display is already on the requested mode — that restriction is what
keeps Dolby Vision switching from blanking strict displays (the Star Trek / BD‑J
black‑screen class of bug), and it predates this release. The practical effect is
that our hotplug recovery is more conservative than stock upstream's. Hotplug
behaviour was not re‑tested on hardware for this release; if you regularly
replug HDMI or power‑cycle an AVR mid‑session, you are the person who will find
out first, and reports are welcome.

⚙️ Upstream: two new playback settings

"Don't show subtitles matching the audio language" (off by default). Many files
ship a subtitle track in the same language as the audio, and Kodi would switch it
on automatically whenever it matched your preferred subtitle language. With this
enabled, that preselection is skipped. Forced subtitles are unaffected, and you can
still pick the track from the OSD.

Stream display order for video/audio/subtitle lists. You can now choose how
the OSD's track lists are ordered, and the next/previous/cycle track actions
honour that same order rather than a fixed one.

▶️ Upstream: playback fixes

• Stream start no longer gets stuck in a stall loop. When a stream starts the
  hardware decoder buffer is empty by definition, and the stall detector did not
  account for that — it could retry indefinitely instead of simply waiting for the
  first frame.
• The renderer no longer presents the configuration‑only first frame. The
  first decoded frame exists to configure the renderer; it is now dropped rather
  than shown.
• Library and scanner work: the scanner reuses an already‑parsed .nfo when
  looking for movie versions, video track languages are shown as English names
  rather than codes, and a long list page‑size miscalculation is fixed.

🔒 CoreELEC OS updates

Upstream CoreELEC brings the usual package refresh, including two that are worth
calling out:

• wsdd2: two remote memory‑safety bugs found by fuzzing, fixed.
• Samba 4.24.6.

Also updated: tailscale, nmap, proftpd, minisatip, tvheadend, libheif and the HEIF
image decoder addon, glib, ostree, Broadcom wifi firmware, plus a build toolchain
refresh (Rust 1.98, Go 1.27). On the Amlogic side, the kernel driver package and
the u‑boot patch set were both refreshed upstream.

🛡️ What this build had to defend through the rebase

Upstream changed code inside three functions this build also modifies. In each
case the fix here was kept and upstream's surrounding improvements adopted:

• Dolby Vision switching still does not re‑clock the display. Entering DV at an
  unchanged resolution asks the display layer for a forced mode reset; this build
  declines it, because a full mode reset re‑trains the HDMI link and strict
  displays answer that with a black screen. Verified on hardware for this release:
  the DV transition is requested, the reset is declined, and Dolby Vision engages
  anyway.
• Dolby Vision dual‑layer identity. Upstream reorganised how the base and
  enhancement layers are located; this build keeps the stricter per‑stream tagging
  that survives a second pass through the detection code, so a working
  arrangement cannot be torn down mid‑title.
• The new first‑frame drop is combined with, not substituted for, this build's
  decoder session tracking — both behaviours are active.

Twelve pairs of superseded experiments (each an earlier attempt and its own later
reversal) were removed from the history rather than replayed. They cancelled out
exactly, so nothing about the resulting build changes because of it.

✅ What was tested, and what wasn't

Validated on an AM9 Pro running this exact build: clean boot with no failed
services, Dolby Vision file playback with the DV core engaging and releasing
correctly, two seeks mid‑title, memory usage flat across the session (no growth),
audio passthrough sync holding within ±1.7 ms, and the patched Amlogic kernel
driver and dovi.ko correction both confirmed active.

Not tested this round: Blu‑ray disc menus, FEL playback from a dual‑layer
disc, and HDMI hotplug recovery. Nothing in this release targets those paths, but
they are also the paths most exposed to a rebase — treat this build accordingly if
discs are your main use.

Source

• CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260827111509
• Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260827111509

Checksums (SHA256)

51cf659c181760f7dd2a2feb9a5e7ac1fb38b2d271427b4b892b57da1b79d357  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260827111509.tar
04133595e11329fe2577d68d5dace00088e739a46e6eb1657049eabddc2e88d7  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260827111509-Generic.img.gz