It came out originally with LibreELEC 10 a few years back.
If you have a Pi lying around give it a spin, and see if it works for you.
(there were issues with Pi only supporting 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 and something about 3840 vs 4096 horizontal and a bunch of other stuff, but it’s been a while so all that might be fine now. I opted for an Odroid n2+ for my viewing, some folks I hang out with online are happy with the Pi4 for their HDR)
I have the non-plus model. It does HDR
I have never tried with my Pi4
I have had HDR capable monitors and there isn’t still any true HDR support. It can crank up the brightness but the dynamic range isn’t quite there yet.
I tested HDR in Metro Exodus (April of 2023) in Fedora 37 and Windows 11 and the difference is indeed noticeable.
I went by the Arch Wiki and HDR is only supported on selected GPU and game configurations in Linux and not in the desktop applications that I have an use case for (radiology).
I have a 10bit black and white monitor at work but the specs are made to be used with a DVI output and while the GPU had it, it could not output true 10bit signals when I checked the spec.
Maybe try and HDMI to DVI adaptor? Inwas thinking about settting up the HDR stuff from mainline gnome git to see what it looked like on my LG C2 42. I could also just try on my Laptop running Win 11 for a comparison. All AMD systems.
I don’t care about gaming. How is it for jellyfin or plex support? That is all I care about is the media consumption aspect of hdr. If still not supported, will remain on windows. Though windows lately has been a pain in the ass for some of my use cases.
Is it confirmed that kodi works with hdr? Or is that not a thing? What about nvidia?
I suppose my only hdr stuff anyways is h265 and I dont encode it, I could just use my shield for that and regular media consumption keep my htpc linux.
HDR works with Libreelec/Kodi, I’ve HDR working since early 2022, first with Custom Image and with the current release officially
well Nvidia, this is not exactly the first choice of the Libreelec developers when it comes to GPUs, I don’t think it works, but not sure…
edit: you can run jellyfin via docker with Libreelec
Just an update. Steamdeck OS and oled variant has hdr and vrr. Pretty neat.
Yeah, it is using gamscope to make this all work. Basically hypetland, kde, and game scope have some working hdr amd vrr. Cosmic and Gnome are working on their oen HDR and VRR implementations as well.
If it ever releases ill got back to popos as my htpc. Also I would like truehd and dts playback support. id like just media play back on hdr. might be nice if hdr10+ and dolbyvision were supported.
Nice. Seems like HDR and Wayland are picking up pace lately…
hyprland is very intriguing. I’m still running KDE/X11 on Tumbleweed.
Off to new frontiers? It will be glorious! (and I will break stuff 
)
PoP is my go-to on my laptop. But I really want that new Cosmic PoP…22.04 is kinda meh atm
That’s not exactly how I’d interpret it.
People forget just how old the X11 framework is.
Xorg was a complete rewrite of XWindow System that had its first stable release in 2004. This was deemed necessary because X11 dated back to 1984 and had become a “too many chefs” style unmanageable mess of attempted hyper-hardware optimization, poor coding practices and poor documentation over the years, and was deemed to be unsalvageable as was.
Xorg today, almost 20 years later, is not quite as bad as X11 was in the early 2000’s, but it has many of the same problems. That, and it used the same framework as X11, which - as previously noted - dated back to 1984. Sometimes you just have to start with a clean slate rather than trying to continuous update things in the name of backwards compatibility.
That’s the case with Xorg today.
It’s based on a 40 year old framework, designed based on assumptions in 1984, the year Prince released When Doves Cry, and the top movies were Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Police Academy and Footloose were the top new films in the land.
(Damn, 1984 was a pretty great year in iconic fun films)
It’s just a dated framework. It runs as a root service, which has all sorts of potential security concerns, and there are very many performance pitfalls, and struggles with more than one video card. It really does need to die. It did it’s job. It kept the GUI alive on Linux/Unix for 40 years, but its time for it to retire.
Any major overhauls to Xorg at this point to add new features would be a mistake. It’s better to let it ride off into the sunset, and be replaced by Wayland.
That’s not to say I love everything that has happened with Wayland, including many of the priorities of the project, but Xorg really needs to be replaced.
Edit: Sorry, just realized I replied to a very old post.
Honestly,
I don’t really care about HDR in gaming in Linux. I don’t really care about Gaming in Linux at all, to be honest. As a reasonably early adopter of 4k monitors in 2015, I have been fighting getting adequate performance for a long time.
The only way I’ll ever run games under Linux is if Linux reaches performance parity with Windows (or gains a performance advantage). Even a 2% reduction in framerate is too much. Let alone the double digit performance losses I frequently see in many titles.
Until then, I’ll just dual boot to a minimal Windows install dedicated to games, because that’s all that Windows is good for to me anymore.
That, and Proton and DXVK are all jank. It’s way too close to emulators for my tastes. Native or bust.
I’d be pretty excited to be able to view HDR video on my linux desktop though.
I mean, I know it can be done. Various embedded LibreElec/CoreElec devices pull it off on single board ARM based computers using KODI, so why not on a typical x86 desktop?
Because they don’t run X or Wayland at all. Kodi implements their own session, which means direct hardware access without going through a maze of compositors. And you can do that on a regular desktop just as well.
Wendell has stated oftentimes that some games work faster in Linux vs Windows.
Gaming on linux isn’t really why I care.
While some people do care, I’m much more interested in HDR on linux for the sake of media creation and media consumption.
When watching something, the overall experience of a 1080p HDR stream tends to me a step above a 4k SDR stream (accounting for codec, bit rates etc. ) IME.
As for content creation, the only “good” HDR platform at the moment that you don’t have to hack together is using Apple hardware and a reference monitor.
Anything else tends to have problems for at least one part of the chain.
I’d love to be able to open a project in blender+Resolve and make real things in them, instead of hacking something together.
Necro-ing this thread for 2024:
So I was able to use my Linux Gaming PC with HDR (I have an HDR600 capable monitor) via Nobara’s gamescope-session - I basically turn my PC into a SteamDeck OLED of sorts…
So I thought of the next thing, consuming media. I tried to add both portable versions of VLC and MPC-HC through the “Add non-steam games to my library” so that I could watch videos (that I totally ripped from BluRay and not downloaded from The Bay) in HDR but it still seems washed in grays and not tone mapped correctly. I tried adding madVR to the portable version of MPC-HC but it doesnt seem to work.
Any work arounds? Does the non-steam games simply not work correctly with gamescope-session? Are there any launch parameters I should try?
If it’s tonemapped it’s not HDR anyway, it’s mapped from the HDR values to “acceptable” SDR values. So that your compositor and/or display are showing you something that isn’t washed out.
If you have a fully HDR capable chain you get the HDR values in the video feed on your display and most displays will tell you it’s now in HDR mode.
I don’t know enough about whatever nobara does with gamescope to know whether it fully supports this. But either way you’ll have to figure out why the players either aren’t seeing HDR capability or are seeing it but the colors aren’t going through to the display.
Seeing as the colors are washed out it seems both players aren’t tonemapping at all, which would indicate they are seeing some kind of HDR capability already. But then again I haven’t used either VLC or MPC-HC to know if they even do tonemapping at all (and properly).
Personally I use mpv (or Kodi) and it definitely works there.
Interesting!
You could add linux native apps to the gamescope-session/steam deck mode. Ill try that shortly!
I may mucckabout with gamescope with my monitor to see how it goes.