Last night the Google Play Store silently pushed Nexus v21.0 to people on their Sony/AndroidTV’s.
The Omega update has hosed ANY and ALL 4K DolbyVision files I try and even some of the regular 4K ones are hit and miss (seems 50/50). The startup delay between hitting ‘Play’ and a result is a good 5 secs where before it was nearly unnoticeable. The Video Judder/Stuttering is massive and I get buffering (spinning blue icon) every 10-20 secs. Kodi is basically unusable at this point for viewing most 4K content. All the 1080p/720 h264/x265 stuff seems unaffected.
I’ve been running Kodi for years now. Had a standalone Vero 4k but did away with that when I discovered my Sony could use a built-in Google Play Store version of Kodi to do the same thing, better. Its a 3 yr old XBR-65A8F running Android v9.0.0. Was really hopeful that Omega would fix the DV flag and enable my tv to run those files. It has always used the fallback to HDR mode under Nexus v20. Those files played perfectly well from a Synology NAS over SMB for years now at this point. Hundreds of files. The TV has 8 GB of internal memory so the 5gb database file is stored internally, newer Sony’s run the latest Android version and seem to only have 4GB so it gets pretty hard if you have a large library with embedded artwork and such. I can use other more clunky apps on the TV but Kodi does all the everyday heavy lifting. A external player (aTV/inFuse) and the DolbyVision flag (mostly) works but I hate the interface.
If there’s an option to downgrade or prevent updates from the store on the Sony Bravia/Android platform I am unaware of how/where to find it. I’d love to downgrade at this point, even though resetting and rebuilding the shares and database is going to be a very NASTY experience if its even possible. Any other tips or suggestions are welcome. Hopefully they’re a magic silver bullet that fixes this.
Google, you f#$#ed up, you should’ve NEVER greenlit this. Massive failure.