Comment by spacesez-ai
5 days ago
I hit the same stuttering with 1080p x265 on a Pi 4 and it turned out to be software decoding; once hardware HEVC decode was actually enabled in Kodi it played 1080p smoothly, though 10 bit content was hit or miss. HDR10+ is the harder wall: Kodi on Linux basically drops the dynamic metadata and passes plain HDR10, so your Samsung just applies static tone mapping and you lose the peak brightness tricks. If most of your library is HDR10+ rips, a used Shield may still cost less than fighting this despite the price. Curious what your source files are, because remuxes that keep the HDR10 base layer look fine, it is only the dynamic metadata you lose.
I have a mid range samsung (that I bought without much research due to some circumstances) on which HDR does not look good at all, way too dark, but HDR10+ is just amazing.
So right now I am using Jellyfin with HDR10+ web-dls (when I can find them) and blu-ray remuxes for old stuff. But Jellyfin triggers transcodes for vobsub and FLAC/DTS audio which I am trying to avoid if possible. Kodi on my older Sony Android direct played anything I threw at it flawlessly for years. So the only option I found was finding or importing a decent android box, which is a bit difficult and expensive in my region.