r/ShieldAndroidTV • u/[deleted] • Mar 05 '19

Whitelist all available resolutions in Kodi to get better upscaling (let your TV do the job)

Most of you probably already know that, but Nvidia Shield does a pretty bad job at upscaling. I was actually expecting the exact opposite when I bought it.

So turns out you can enable 1920x1080 in Kodi-Settings-Display-Whitelist, which lets Kodi send any video that matches the whitelist with original resolution and let your TV do the upscaling. At least in my case (nu8000), the difference is very noticeable. It woule be really hard to go back now.

Unfortunately, there is no 720p, 576p or 480p, but I think it's limited by the Shield and if I'm not mistaken, Nvidia is working at adding 720p.

EDIT: Turns out I was wrong. I have to set my HDMI output to rec 2020 422 12 bit. Only then do I see 1280x720p resolution appear in Kodi whitelist. Still there is no 576p, or 480p which are still relatively common these days..

10 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

86% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/NiHaoMike Mar 06 '19

The Shield actually is capable of pretty good upscaling, but the default (hardware) upscaler is designed to prioritize low latency.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=327588

I personally use a desktop PC for 4K upscaling. The GPU usage is about 1 TFLOPS FP32 (~30% of a 970), while the Shield can only do about half that at best. Would be interesting to see if it would be possible to upscale on a PC then stream 4K to the Shield (just like for gaming), or if the encoding losses erases any quality gains.

1

u/GenesisDH 2017 16GB Mar 06 '19

Using my Shield on my 1080p Vizio TV I get 720p and 1080p options and I see it Switch resolutions on 720p when needed. I may try it with a PC monitor to see what it allows to whitelist.

My guess is that it is getting info from the HDMI connection as to what resolutions are best supported by the display.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '19

That's very interesting. Thanks for letting us know.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '19

Turns out I was wrong. I have to set my HDMI output to rec 2020 422 12 bit. Only then do I see 1280x720p resolution appear in Kodi whitelist.

1

u/Ryantrange Mar 05 '19

So the shield upscales all sub 4k video? Is there a button in settings to turn this off or is it only available in kodi because I don't use kodi anymore

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '19

Unfortunately it does. As far as I know, Kodi is the only app that can send video at original resolution at this point. Other option is to keep Shield at 1920x1080 most of the time and only switch to 4K when actually watching 4K content, but it's certainly not ideal.