Hello all, first time poster but I've been reading this forum amongst other sources to build my ambilight setup which is up and running now (like many others here). Thought I'd make my first about my current setup and findings. I wanted to start simple and now have the following up and running:
- 220 W2812b leds (60/m) behind my 55" LG OLED TV, controlled by a Wemos D1 Mini flashed with WLED and all powered by a single 5V 10A power source.
- Raspberry Pi 4 running Hyperion.ng Alpha 5 and latest Kodi on Raspbian Buster using internal framegrabber.
- Hyperion.ng data is send to WLED using UDP(Raw) and there doesn't seem to be much noticeable delay.
I went for WLED because it seemed easier to configure but I'm curious now if there would be even less delay hooking the LEDs up directly on the Pi. Since it's not a lot of work I'll try that out soon either through USB or direct wiring, even though it's not bothering me too much. Update: Now controlling WLED over USB using adalight interface and all delays are gone. Incredibly responsive. See post below.
From my tryouts it seems Hyperion.ng DispmanX performs way better on Raspbian then on LibreElec: no signal blackouts or HDMI signal failure while grabbing at 30fps (even on 1080p 60hz content) for really fast and smooth lights. I got a lot of these blackouts on LibreElec even with 10fps to the LEDs.
Hyperion / Ambilight is automatically enabled/disabled when TV is on Kodi or PS4 source and sun is almost down (using Home Assistant).
I didn't really want to invest in HDMI splitters/grabbers (yet) since it seems like a hassle to get them to work and I first would like to invest in a new AVR (with multiple outputs). Everything below 4k works through Kodi, even Netflix, so I'm already quite happy with that. Of course I would like support for 4k and HDR but that's to come, hopefully.
I still wanted to have ambilight when playing games on my PS4 Pro though.... and found a way!
By using a separate PSN account you can start Remote Play and share your screen on other devices. Using Chiaki on an Android phone (the official Remote Play app doesn't allow screen grabbing), together with the Hyperion Android Grabber app you can use ambilight with a PS4 Pro through software only and it even works with HDR content since Remote Play ignores/converts that!
Of course this requires some manual steps: turn on Android Grabber and Chiaki, but this is done in 4 taps on my phone. Chiaki is open source and also available for Linux so there could be a way to run this on the Hyperion instance and even use it as a video source within Hyperion itself. Devs? Another way would be to use Tasker to automate this, together with Home Assistant, on an old Android device.
Here is little video of PS4 HDR software capture. Please ignore the quality, could only use my laptops webcam Proper color calibration still needs to be done, and probably some other tweaking.
For now I'm really happy with the software only setup. I would also like the explore the idea of using a (fisheye) camera to bypass 4K HDR DRM content, as seen on some topics on this forum, but fear it might not work as well. I'll start exploring this approach in the next few weeks.
See you on the forums!