2015-02-19, 03:04
Not trying to reinvent the wheel - just trying to understand the wheel. Clearly, if the wiki is linking to partially correct info, then the topic is more involved than it seems. The various posts here have helped - including yours, so thanks for that.
In my particular case, I've got multiple sources coming into this monitor, and intend on using the chromebox for more than just kodi (hence the dual-boot non-standalone install), and in fact, I've got a plasma t.v. on the way, so I'll be revisiting this all again soon... So understanding why is as important as understanding what. "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Anyway, if I've finally got it right, it seems to boil down to: 16-235 range is inherent to the codec & would be "right" assuming the rest of the chain is video equipment. I.e. scaling is only necessary to make the image fit in with the rest of what's going on in a PC (gui, etc.). Only in the case of a display that natively eats 16-235 is there a special configuration, which is specifically to pass the data through unscaled, rather than scaling in the decode then de-scaling at the GPU. This is a bump up in image quality for the video, at the expense of everything else being improperly out-of-range for the display. (Except maybe kodi is smart enough to adjust its gui values to 16-235 as well?)
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EDIT: regarding the wifi issue, my admittedly unscientific results: stock chromebox did indeed show similar wifi performance, based on copying a ~700MB file over the network, since that's all I could think of to do from ChromeOS. However, I did manage to get pretty good speed in general by forcing it to connect to the 5GHz side of my router. Something like ~25MB/s.
In my particular case, I've got multiple sources coming into this monitor, and intend on using the chromebox for more than just kodi (hence the dual-boot non-standalone install), and in fact, I've got a plasma t.v. on the way, so I'll be revisiting this all again soon... So understanding why is as important as understanding what. "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Anyway, if I've finally got it right, it seems to boil down to: 16-235 range is inherent to the codec & would be "right" assuming the rest of the chain is video equipment. I.e. scaling is only necessary to make the image fit in with the rest of what's going on in a PC (gui, etc.). Only in the case of a display that natively eats 16-235 is there a special configuration, which is specifically to pass the data through unscaled, rather than scaling in the decode then de-scaling at the GPU. This is a bump up in image quality for the video, at the expense of everything else being improperly out-of-range for the display. (Except maybe kodi is smart enough to adjust its gui values to 16-235 as well?)
-----------
EDIT: regarding the wifi issue, my admittedly unscientific results: stock chromebox did indeed show similar wifi performance, based on copying a ~700MB file over the network, since that's all I could think of to do from ChromeOS. However, I did manage to get pretty good speed in general by forcing it to connect to the 5GHz side of my router. Something like ~25MB/s.
