Haven’t been here in some time and noticed a couple of changes I’d like to know a bit more of. Today, I noticed that under System/System Settings/Display:
#1.The default CoreELEC (running latest nightly) Resolution and Refresh Rate has changed to 3840x2160p and 23.98Hz. (Compared to the previous default of 59.94Hz).
#2. There is a new resolution option available, 4096x2160p. A quick Google search stated that 4096x2160p is “True 4K” resolution, compared to UHD resolution of 3840x2160p.
The following are my questions regarding:
#1. Why is CoreLEC using a default refresh rate of 23.98Hz, when Kodi still uses 59.94Hz? Is there a benefit of using one vs. the other?
#2. If 4096x2160p is “True 4K”, isn’t it better to use that rather than only UHD (3840x2160p)?
Are there any pros/cons if I decide to use 4096 instead?
I checked my other Kodi boxes (not running CoreELEC) and they are still using the default of 3840x2160p with 59.94Hz refresh rate. These boxes also do not have the option of a 4096x2160p resolution.
P.S. - I am not experiencing any issues whatsoever with my N2 box. I mainly use it to play 4K HDR movies on an OLED TV and I my sole purpose of this post is to understand the difference of these settings and educate myself on how to properly use them. Thanks in advance for your help!
for #1 Not sure why the change in default refresh rate. It’s not intentional, and possibly related to your TV telling the device that it’s the TV’s preference.
for #2 UHD(3840x2160) is what is meant any time something is said to be 4k. The content is UHD, the panel in your TV is UHD. So the only thing “true 4k” about 4096x2160 is the fact that mathematically it is literally 4k. So there is no benefit to it, but some possible drawbacks instead. Some TVs don’t play nicely with 4096x2160p despite claiming support for it, best case it gets scaled down to UHD in the TV, worst case you get no picture.
It’s likely that that was the only refresh rate at 4096x2160p that your TV claimed to support.
HDMI has a feature called EDID, that lets the TV tell anything attached to it what the TV is able to do.
CoreELEC uses that information to determine what display modes to offer, it also uses it to determine if it should try to turn on features like HLG/HDR/HDR10+ when the user plays content that has HDR information in it. In addition to information about video features, EDID also contains information about audio features a TV may support.
Unfortunately you may at times get situations where the EDID information may not be 100% correct(Some times the manufacture gets it a little wrong, sometimes another device like an AVR does not 100% faithfully pass the EDID info from the TV), which can mess up CoreELEC’s ability to figure out what it should be doing.