⚠️ 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-20260911164420
(see that release and its predecessors for the standing feature set: Blu‑ray disc
menus, HDR10+ → Dolby Vision conversion, CMv4.0 metadata control, DV → HDR10 that
stays in HDR10, FEL profile‑7 reconstruction on non‑DV displays, VS10 output on
non‑DV displays, VSVDB override, disc‑stated menu detection and episode lists).

It brings in about a week of upstream CoreELEC and Kodi work, including the new
HDR subtitle handling, plus a new audio option from avdvplus and p3i.

⚠️ 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.

🔊 New: turn off the receiver's dialogue normalisation (passthrough)

Dolby and DTS soundtracks carry a "dialogue normalisation" value that tells the
receiver to turn the whole soundtrack down, often by several dB, so that dialogue
sits at a standard level. Many people would rather hear the mix at full level.

Four new options under System → Audio (passthrough settings, Advanced level),
all off by default, rewrite that value to 0 dB before the audio leaves the box:

• AC3 / EAC3 dialogue normalisation defeat.
• Include EAC3 Atmos (breaks Atmos) — a separate opt‑in: receivers stop rendering
  Atmos objects on a rewritten Dolby Digital Plus Atmos stream and fall back to
  plain DD+ surround.
• TrueHD dialogue normalisation defeat — every presentation in the stream
  (2, 6 and 8 channel, and Atmos).
• DTS / DTS‑HD dialogue normalisation defeat — DTS, DTS‑HD HRA and MA, DTS:X.

Be careful with TrueHD: that attenuation is headroom the mix may rely on. On
titles mastered close to full scale the loudest moments can overload the receiver
and make it mute for about a second. Turn the option off if that happens.

The player process info (the codec info overlay) now shows the stream's dialogue
normalisation and what is actually being applied, e.g. -7 dB (applied 0 dB).

This feature is the work of avdvplus and p3i — thank you both. While porting it we
checked every field against the Dolby, ATSC and ETSI specifications and fixed two
things along the way:

• DTS: on streams from older DTS encoders (header revision 6) the original
  wrote a value that still meant −16 dB. Those streams now really get 0 dB.
• TrueHD: the original only changed the Atmos presentation, so regular 5.1/7.1
  TrueHD — and Atmos played on a non‑Atmos receiver — was still turned down.

Tested with test streams in every format: the rewritten audio passes strict
decoder checks and plays as a clean passthrough stream on the box. It has not yet
been listened to on real discs — tell us how it sounds.

🎬 New from upstream: HDR subtitles that look right

Upstream Kodi and CoreELEC reworked how Blu‑ray (PGS) subtitles are shown on HDR
video: UHD disc subtitles are drawn at their authored HDR brightness and colour
instead of going through the menu conversion, which left them dim and washed out.
Our build's own Dolby Vision/HDR menu compositing needed a matching change so the
subtitles are not wiped from the picture, and that is included.

⚠️ This is the change we most want feedback on: please try UHD discs with image
subtitles in Dolby Vision and in HDR10 output.

💡 Changed: menus are brighter during Dolby Vision — and a switch to undo it

Upstream CoreELEC now tells the Dolby Vision engine to use the peak brightness your
TV reports for the menus and on‑screen display, instead of a fixed level of about
300 nits. On a bright TV the menus during DV playback get considerably brighter.

• New setting System → CoreELEC → Display → "GUI brightness follows the display
  peak". On (default) is the new upstream behaviour; off puts the menus back
  at the previous ~300 nits. It takes effect immediately, even during playback.
• The VS10 HDR10 OSD brightness slider works again with this upstream change —
  it was being silently overridden.

Also fixed in the same upstream change: it read the brightness range of many
current Dolby Vision TVs wrongly (TVs with the newer "version 2" capability block —
an LG G6 came out as 1200 nits instead of about 2485). This build reads it the way
the Dolby format defines it.

🛠️ Fixed

• CoreELEC settings failed to apply the keyboard layout at startup. Upstream Kodi
  changed how add‑ons talk to it and missed one CoreELEC‑specific piece, so the
  CoreELEC settings add‑on logged an error on every boot. Fixed.
• Blu‑ray still frames and short network stalls. Upstream's history rewrite
  dropped an older CoreELEC fix that our still‑frame handling depends on; without it
  a still or a brief Wi‑Fi dip could stall the video thread for up to 5 seconds and
  throw away the picture on screen. Restored.

Under the hood

• Rebased on current upstream: Kodi aml-5.15.196-22.0 @ d11ac91fb8, CoreELEC
  coreelec-22 @ 03edc358c5 (upstream rewrote its Kodi branch history again; all
  of this build's changes were replayed and checked).
• Notable upstream changes also included:
  • Optical drives: fixes for a use‑after‑free, GUI freezes while a disc is being
    read, and better Blu‑ray episode matching.
  • HDMI‑CEC: an explicit standby is honoured when Kodi is not the active source.
  • Audio: ALSA error recovery fix.
  • Playback start: the screen is cleared while no video renderer exists yet.
  • CoreELEC: Mesa 26.2.3, systemd 261.3, kernel firmware 20260910; Amlogic Wi‑Fi
    stacks (cfg80211/mac80211) built as modules; MT7921 Wi‑Fi HE fix; S6 device‑tree
    memory reservation fix; S905Y5 4G board added.
• Kernel patches: two new (0014 reads DV v2 brightness correctly, 0015 adds the
  menu brightness switch); all 15 verified to apply and land on the new kernel source.

Source

• CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260917084023
• Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260917084023

Checksums (SHA256)

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86354678ac074801842ce17b34248eac879f0a0f88af17fd7277151f69e34069  CoreELEC-Amlogic-no.aarch64-22.0-Piers-samurihl-EXPERIMENTAL_20260917084023-Generic.img.gz