[onsmike]

hi,

recently I have encountered a problem in which the audio/subtitle of a video plays fine, but all I get is a black screen. As it turns out, it was encoded in 10-bit h265. To rectify the problem, I used handbrake to re-encode the video into 8-bit h265, then all my devices with kodi play the video just fine.

I do wonder, however, what is the cause of this. Two particular systems/hardware I am using but only got black screen on 10-bit h265 video are:

1) Windows 10, 64-bit with Intel i5-4690K. It has Intel HD Graphics 4600. Using kodi 18.8

2) Firetv 4k with kodi 18.6 sideloaded.

My questions are:
a) are both my hardwares (Intel i5 and Firetv 4k) capable of decoding 1-bit h265, and if so
b) what could be the possible problems for causing the black screen, and is there a solution to it?

any help is very much appreciated,

regards,

[Klojum]

Intel HD Graphics 4600

The GPU part of that chip was designed in 2013, and thus was not ready for HEVC (8 or 10 bit) decoding.
Your CPU will have to do all the hard work there. I doubt very much your PC is up to that task, since you already had to "downgrade" the video format. 8-bit video is a bit easier to handle, but it still depends on the bit rate whether your PC will display such videos.

I never had or used a FireTV stick/box/device, so I cannot help you there. The '4K' suffix does suggest it should be capable of handling H.265 video files.