Recommended USB Grabber for HDR/Dolby Vision

[rlg6767]

Hi. First off what a great project and massive thanks to the developers for this product!

I have been ploughing through a lot of useful guides, discussion forums & articles but I am still a bit stumped when it comes to which USB grabber is best for my needs. Examples of the guides I am referring to are The Holy Grail of HDR: support for P010 format and MS2130 grabber. Summary and firmware testing to name a couple but I am still a bit lost.

I have been running HyperHDR for some time using an EZCOO splitter (EZ-SP12H2) and I recently purchased a grabber (UGreen CM360) which works perfectly for SDR but doesn't work so well for HDR (washed out) and not at all for Dolby Vision. I appreciate that I can callibrate LUT tables for the HDR side of things but my grabber flat out refuses to work with Dolby Vision My requirement is for screen grabbing from my Nvidia Shield (4K 60Hz, SDR, HDR and Dolby Vision) and my Xbox One (4K 60Hz). What is the best grabber for my needs please? I can see a lot of talk about new products coming on the market and things seem to be moving quite quickly hence why I am little confused and could with some help.

For reference I am running HyperHDR 21 beta as a Proxmox container but could easily switch to a Raspberry Pi if that better suits my needs.

Many thanks!

[awawa-dev]

Hi
As for Dolby Vision (only LLDV is supported), what are your symptoms that it doesn't work? It's the HDMI splitter's job, not the grabber's job, to handle LLDV correctly, so replacing the grabber I don't know if it will change anything (although it can't be ruled out if the EDID grabber changes).

doesn't work so well for HDR (washed out)

Have you actually enabled tone mapping? Can you pause the video player and take screenshots of the live preview in HyperHDR with and without tone mapping enabled? Have you calibrated the LUT for HDR?
Usually in the case of Ezcoo HDR and DV(LLDV) use the same LUT table, LLDV is basically HDR10 without meta tags.

I currently use UGREEN 25173 but only because of P010 format. If I had to rate it, it would look like this:
the old Elgato HD60X is much better than UGreen 25173 especially in modes other than P010, but UGreen 25173 is better or comparable to the new Elgato HD60X which lacks P010 scaling.

BTW, can you check the "lsusb" command to see what grabber IDs are there?

[rlg6767]

Have one last thing, well two things, I want to try before I flash the grabber. I have a small NUC that I have installed Ubuntu directly on, will try to see if that helps to rule out Proxmox/Virtualisation etc. I also tried my laptop running Win 11 and that seemed to work flawlessly, albeit with fairly limited testing. If bare metal Ubuntu doesn't work so well will install Windows on the NUC and test these out and report back. If neither of these work, will proceed with flashing.

[awawa-dev]

Yes, leave the flashing for the very end. And on what unit did you previously test the MS2131 and there were these errors: Raspberry Pi? If so, it is very possible that it is a power supply issue, MS213x needs much more power than its predecessor MS2109

[rlg6767]

It was Ubuntu 22.04 running as a VM in Proxmox previously. I also tried Ubuntu 24.04 VM also on Proxmox. Last night I fired up HyperHDR on my Win11 laptop and it just seemed to "work". Will continue to test over the weekend and report back with results.

[rlg6767]

OK so I have succesfully flashed the device now. Just doing the calibration for HDR. Do I turn these off for callibration?

And this?

[awawa-dev]

Don't enable auto tone mapping for calibration. You can do it later if you need it so that HyperHDR automatically controls tone mapping but only after you have calibrated LUT (https://github.com/awawa-dev/HyperHDR/wiki/Automatic-tone-mapping). Tone mapping is irrelevant for calibration using MP4 video files, it will enable it by itself anyway. Quarter frame should be disabled for calibration, as in the instructions: https://github.com/awawa-dev/HyperHDR/wiki/lut-calibration

[Pavel2025-byte]

Hi! I am using Ezcoo EZ-SP12H2 with MS2130 and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W but I get wrong colors. Can you please tell me how to fix this?

[awawa-dev]

Maybe it's a Dolby Vision then only Low Latency Dolby Vision (LLDV) is supported by the splitter if the grabber is connected to Ezcoo output 2 and has scaler enabled for output 2. Or maybe this is a problem: #848

[Pavel2025-byte]

Thanks, I'll try.

[Tchekevala]

I was getting a very bad color too, but i switch to another computer ( graphic card) everything look PERFECT now

[Muyagi]

Hi. I changed from MS2130 to UGREEN25173 and when I watch something from Netflix for example the grabber gets no video. With the MS2130 I hadn’t the problem. Rest of the hardware is the same. What could be the problem?

[awawa-dev]

It's hard to make a diagnosis or even a hypothesis from the description of the situation presented. UGreen 25173 supports much higher video bandwidth than MS2130 and it is an HDMI 2.0 grabber and not HDMI 1.4 like MS2130. I would bet on HDCP but since the rest hasn't changed and Ezcoo is still ahead of UGreen it should remove it...

[Muyagi]

I turned the scaler off for Out2, then it worked.