⚠️ 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 a small, focused update to
v22.0-samurihl-20260917084023
(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,
and the dialogue‑normalisation defeat options).

It fixes three real faults in Dolby Vision output switching, all of them found
from one user's regression report, plus two upstream fixes worth having early.

⚠️ 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.

🛠️ Fixed: choosing player‑led Dolby Vision didn't always take effect

If you played something in TV‑led Dolby Vision, then switched the setting to
player‑led and converted SDR or HDR10 content to Dolby Vision, the box could
still be driving the TV in the old mode. The picture came out wrong — and on a
strict HDMI chain (an HDMI splitter/scaler in the path, for example) it could be a
black screen rather than merely wrong colours.

The reverse happened too: after a player‑led session, a TV‑led conversion could
signal low‑latency Dolby Vision over a link the TV was not expecting.

Starting a native Dolby Vision title always worked, which is what made this
confusing to run into — the fault only showed when the conversion was switched on
during playback or picked up from a setting.

Why: the low‑latency signalling mode was only ever sent to the driver when a video
stream opened, and nothing reset it in between. Switching output live inherited
whatever the last Dolby Vision title had left behind. The setting is now sent every
time Dolby Vision output is engaged, not just at the start of a stream.

🛠️ Fixed: going back to normal output left the HDMI settings wrong

Coming out of Dolby Vision did not always restore the picture format the TV was
on before:

• From TV‑led Dolby Vision back to Original on SDR content, the link stayed at
  8‑bit.
• From player‑led Dolby Vision back to SDR, it stayed at 12‑bit 4:2:2.
• Some HDR10 returns stayed at 8‑bit too.

Pressing Original a second time changed nothing, because nothing in that path
was capable of undoing it.

Two separate causes, both fixed. The graphics driver keeps the colour format from
one screen mode to the next and only re‑chooses it when explicitly asked; we were
only asking when leaving TV‑led Dolby Vision, never player‑led. And choosing
"Original" on non‑Dolby‑Vision content left the Dolby Vision engine switched on but
idle, which the driver still treats as "Dolby Vision is on the wire" — so it kept
the link pinned. The engine is now shut down properly in that case, and the format
is handed back to the driver on both ways out.

Thank you to the user who reported these with a full mode‑switching regression
matrix — the report named the exact combinations, which is what made them
reproducible here.

🛠️ Also fixed (from upstream, taken early)

• A rare, unexplained crash. Two add‑ons reading info labels while the screen
  redraws could collide over a list that is never locked, and Kodi would vanish with
  no useful log. If you have unexplained crashes with service add‑ons running, this
  may be them.
• Eject used the wrong drive. With more than one optical drive, ejecting from a
  disc's menu always opened the first drive rather than the one holding that disc.

⚠️ What still needs your ears

Leaving player‑led Dolby Vision during playback now re‑trains the HDMI link where it
previously did nothing. That is the correct behaviour, but a re‑train briefly pauses
and re‑anchors playback, and audio/video sync across that moment has not been
listened to yet. If you switch Dolby Vision modes mid‑film and hear lipsync drift
afterwards, please say so.

Likewise, these changes touch code that Blu‑ray disc menu sessions rely on. The
safeguards that keep a disc session from re‑training the link were left intact and
checked, but a full disc‑menu pass has not been run. Report anything odd with
menus on a real disc.

Under the hood

• All Dolby Vision changes were validated on an AM9 Pro against the reporter's own
  build, by reproducing each fault first and then confirming the fix: the failing
  case, the mirror case, the "press Original twice" case, and a check that a native
  Dolby Vision title is left alone.
• The low‑latency policy write now reads back what the driver actually took and logs
  a warning if they disagree, so a dropped write can't hide in a field log again.
• Kernel patches unchanged; the common_drivers pin is deliberately held. Upstream's
  only new driver content is this project's own patch 0004, which CoreELEC has
  since taken upstream, plus a change to Dolby VSVDB v2 brightness decoding that
  disagrees with patch 0014 — and patch 0014's reading is the one that matches
  edid-decode, dovi.ko and a measured display.
• Upstream cherry‑picks: Kodi 864cb9b851 (info‑label threading crash) and
  02a4f539c2 (eject the correct drive).

Source

• CoreELEC (distro): SamuriHL/CoreELEC tag v22.0-samurihl-20260919142117
• Kodi: SamuriHL/coreelec-xbmc tag v22.0-samurihl-20260919142117

Checksums (SHA256)

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