thanks @Portisch was not aware could simply write those.
TLDR: I changed the dolby_vision_wait_delay to 16 to get all my MEL titles to trigger MEL detection and play consistently (within the bounds of my testing / setup).
I could get all working at some points with a delay of 9 or lower - depending on the title, but it was not consistent - leading to thinking some other timing factors are coming into play - 16 is consistent for me and provides some room above 9 for other factors.
Below is a list of titles I had the most issues with using the default delay of 2, ordered from most problematic to least:
Dune
Witness
The Fifth Element
Donnie Darko
Get Carter
The Flash
The Great Escape
The Last Emperor
The Matrix Reloaded
Police Story 3 Super Cop
Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse
I also noticed other titles “may” not trigger MEL detection with a delay of 2 - as a one off - in these cases stopping and playing again would always trigger the MEL detection. Could find no clear pattern to this.
Below are all the titles I tested:
65
12 Monkeys
2001 A Space Odyssey
Alita Battle Angel
Barbarella
Black Hawk Down
Blue Beetle
Bullet Train
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Donnie Darko
Dragons Forever
Dune
Get Carter
Ghostbusters
Gregorys Girl
Groundhog Day
Guess Whos Coming to Dinner
His Girl Friday
Kramer vs Kramer
Labyrinth
Lawrence of Arabia
Oldboy
Police Story
Police Story 2
Police Story 3 Super Cop
RoboCop
Rudy
Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man No Way Home
Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi
Starship Troopers
The Batman
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Equalizer 3
The Fifth Element
The Flash
The Great Escape
The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey Ex.
The Hobbit The Battle of the Five Armies Ex.
The Hobbit The Desolation of Smaug Ex.
The Last Emperor
The Last Starfighter
The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring Ex.
The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King Ex.
The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers Ex.
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Resurrections
The Matrix Revolutions
The Ten Commandments
Weird Science
Witness
All testing was done on a AM6B+, through a Sony HT-A9 to an LG E8.
Running 20.4, default settings - with these changes:
- Add Bluetooth Remote
- Enabled - Disable Noise Reduction
- Enabled - Pass Through Audio (all codec enabled)
- Enabled - SSH Access
- Turned on Debug logging.
All mkv files played from File Manger - directly from an SMB Share on a NAS using 1GbE network.
For those wanting to check the same and need some pointers I did the following.
Had two terminal SSH sessions to the box.
First session for changing the delay, (change the value and overwrite file per the test):
CoreELEC:~ # nano /sys/module/amdolby_vision/parameters/dolby_vision_wait_delay
Second for trailing the log for the relevant lines:
CoreELEC:~ # tail -f /storage/.kodi/temp/kodi.log | grep "DoVi"
When playing the film / title you will see the relevant log lines displayed e.g.:
2024-02-24 08:09:45.525 T:11222 debug <general>: CAMLCodec::OpenDecoder DoVi P7 MEL detection frame delay got set to 2 frames
2024-02-24 08:09:45.823 T:11222 debug <general>: CAMLCodec::GetPicture: DoVi P7 MEL content detected, request to reopen decoder
Issue will be observed when you play an MEL title and you do not see the 2nd log line i.e. the decoder was not re-opened to play the MEL title correctly.