Question Need something to play hdr 4K mkv’s

cypher007

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Was thinking to use a pc, as I’ve tried android boxes in the past and not found them easy to get on with.

what sort of system can manage this? I’m hoping to use an old 5th gen intel i3 or even a modern NUC. But I’m wondering if they have hdmi 2.0.
 
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Was thinking to use a pc, as I’ve tried android boxes in the past and not found them easy to get on with.

what sort of system can manage this? I’m hoping to use an old 5th gen intel i3 or even a modern NUC. But I’m wondering if they have hdmi 2.0.

HDR is a major weak point for Windows & third party software, it just does not handle it well unless you want to jump through many hoops, google madvr HDR playback for a taste of whats involved.

I would get an OSMC Vero 4K+ for £107 it will play HEVC 4K HDR files with full HD audio bitstreaming and match frame rate 24Hz output, it runs an optimized build of Kodi for the hardware.
 
I’ve used win 10 and a 1060 to play the files using a madvr setup I found on overclockers. It seemed to work well.

I’ll have a look at these Veto boxes. Will it just play the files correctly? Rather than need lots of tweaking? Can it do Dolby vision?
 
Also I have one of these:

NEXBOX A3 Amlogic S912 Octa-Core 2GB RAM 16GB ROM Android 6.0 2.4G + 5.0G WiFi Gigabit LAN 4K HDR TV Box

Bought it a couple of years ago. Any good?
 
I’ve used win 10 and a 1060 to play the files using a madvr setup I found on overclockers. It seemed to work well.

I’ll have a look at these Veto boxes. Will it just play the files correctly? Rather than need lots of tweaking? Can it do Dolby vision?

Yes it will play HDR10 files without tweaking, but not DV as for Dolby Vision that is a complicated matter, there are multiple versions of DV & licensing to factor in, currently either the player built into a DV capable TV or an AppleTV 4K running MrMC is the best way to play DV content (even then there are limitations with dual layer DV content).

The newest Nvidia Shield Pro has Dolby Vision support so MrMC or Kodi on that may be able to play DV content in time on that.

Does hdr need hdmi 2.0?

Technically no but effectively yes, HDMI 1.4 does not have the bandwith for 4K HDR, you could push HDR out at 1080p but few devices support that.

Also I have one of these:

NEXBOX A3 Amlogic S912 Octa-Core 2GB RAM 16GB ROM Android 6.0 2.4G + 5.0G WiFi Gigabit LAN 4K HDR TV Box

Bought it a couple of years ago. Any good?

Thats a tablet Android box not actual AndroidTV like the Shield, the S912 is a capable chipset however the limiting factor is the software.

You could try loading CoreElec a modified version of Libreelec for set top boxes, you can load it onto an SD card I believe, there is a generic S912 option and a Nexbox A1 available, the Nexbox build might be worth a try as it also uses the S912.

Whether that works with HDR is unknown to me.
 
also have the following hardware:

RPI 3B
intel 6100T in a Z170 motherboard with onboard video. (but I think that only has HDMI 1.4).
ACER Predator PH317-51 laptop with a 1060 6GB (though not sure if that has HDMI 2.0)

the tests I did before were with my Boys gaming rig that's now upstairs with the old TV. ill have a look at my NEXBOX as well. just don't want to buy yet another box if I can do it with the hardware I have. I bought the NEXBOX as I had an idea to use it as a media player, but found the way KODI works confusing.
 
just checked and the NEXBOX A3 is the same hardware as the A1 just a different case. so I should be able to use the coreelec route to try it out.
 
ok setup the Sony XF9005 and its running android yay.

tried the in built media player and it will play even the 62gb file I have and over wifi.

so might not need to go down the external box route.
 
Kodi and MrMC are available on AndroidTV too if you want a fancier front end.
 
tried Kodi and like it but I find it keeps buffering with some of the larger files I have. any settings I can try?

ive connected the TV via my Gigabit lan and it still does it.
 
tried Kodi and like it but I find it keeps buffering with some of the larger files I have. any settings I can try?

ive connected the TV via my Gigabit lan and it still does it.

If your using Windows or Linux SMB/Samba network shares those are less than ideal.

NFS shares are best, if you have a commercial Syno/QNAP NAS or linux media server they are easy to set up, on Windows it's a pain.

The other option is a media server, set up Plex or Emby on your server and have Kodi connect to it, MrMC is better here as it has Plex/Emby support baked in whereas Kodi needs plugins.

With MrMC once you connect to the media server it auto populates the media library with its listings.

Beyond that I think you'd want to ask on the Kodi android forums for better knowledge than I have, I'm not sure you can tweak certain buffer values in config files on Kodi under AndroidTV like you could say under Windows/Linux but I may be wrong.
 

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