How to get Lightberry to output 4K 60fps with HD Fury Linker

You may have read my previous guide on how to setup and configure the Lightberry HD and come across a line where I said…

If you are a 4K user, then you will want to purchase the 4K kit from Lightberry instead as it uses a different HDMI grabber. If you are thinking “Well, I might upgrade to 4K in the next five years and will buy the 4K kit for future proofing” then don’t bother, get the Lightberry HD kit. If you are unsure of what you need, get the Lightberry HD kit!

At the time I was using my Lightberry HD with a standard 1080p TV so there was no real need for me to push the Lightberry 4K as it is a little overly complicated and also limited in what it can handle. So fast forward to October of last year and I bought myself an nice shiny new LG 65″ E6 OLED which obviously supports 4K. Hmmm, now what am I to do with my Lightberry HD since i’ll now be feeding it some 4K content? Should I upgrade to the Lightberry 4K version?

Well unfortunately, upgrading to the 4K version wasn’t really an option and this is due to a limitation with the Lightberry 4K hardware. Basically the HDMI port on the 4K Grabber is limited to HMDI 1.4, this means that it can only support 4K at 30 frames per second (FPS). Now whilst this is entirely fine for most Movies and TV Shows which are 23-25 fps it is obviously an issue when it comes to PC Master Race 4k 60 FPS gaming, or future 4k 60fps video. After searching the internet I came across a device that should help me out. Enter the HD Fury 4K Linker.

Now what does this strange looking device actually do I hear you cry? Well my friend, the 4K linker is a pretty neat bit of kit and what it does is supposed to do is take a 4K feed and then allows you to down-sample that feed into 1080p or lower. Not only does it do this, but it also sends a fake signal to the rest of your HDMI equipment in your chain to pretend that it is a fully 4K capable device. This is important because of the way HDMi works, basically your highest resolution can only be as large as the lowest resolution in the chain. In English please? If you have a 1080p only device connected to any part of a HDMI chain the the max resolution to be passed along that chain is 1080p, so your lovely new 4k TV will not switch into 4k resolution!

“But wait Chewie, you said you bought this back in October, what have you been doing for the past 8 months you lazy piece of crap?” A fair comment, but it has not been down to laziness that I haven’t posted about this, it has been down to the fact that the Linker just wouldn’t work in the way I needed it to. The problem I had was that the Linker was incapable of down sampling a feed which changed the resolution or FPS on the fly. So this would mean that going from my 4k 60fps desktop to opening Plex and playing a 4K movie at 23fps would cause the 4K linker to freeze making it useless. Thankfully though, the linker has had a firmware update and it now handles live display switching without any issues.

So I am still using my original Lightberry HD system but now it can interpret 4K at 60 FPS, and the chain looks something like this…

  1. Marantz SR5010 taking input from 4k PC (Gaming + Plex), 1080p Cable, 1080p Nintendo Switch, 4k PS4 Pro
  2. Marantz SR5010 OUTPUT 1 connected to my 4k 65″ LG E6 OLED TV
  3. Marantz SR5010 OUTPUT 2 (mirroring output 1) connected to the HD Fury 4K Linker
  4. HD FURY 4K Linker is down sampling any 4K content into 1080p 60fps (or leaving existing 1080p feeds alone)
  5. Which is then going into the HDMI Grabber (which admittedly only captures at 720p)
  6. Which is processed by the RasPi running Kodi and Hyperion
  7. Which sends the data out and controls the LEDs

So there you go, the 4k Linker should solve all your issues and although it is a little steep at $179 it does mean that you can enjoy all your content no matter what the source with your Lightberry setup.

Oh, and for the record I still feel the Lightberry HD pack is less hassle than the Lightberry 4K pack when using a 4K Linker.

Also, Black Border detection on Hyperion still sucks absolute ass. The constant mis-detection on movies with black borders is driving me crazy.

Gimme a shout in the comments with your experience or any questions.

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I’m in a similar situation. I have the Lightberry HD and I can’t get 4k/HDR content to work with my new tv. So is it the splitter that is the issue? The HD linker looks like it has 2 inputs 1 output….don’t I need the opposite? Thank you


Hi, I just bought the HDFury Linker to make my Ambilight setup 4k HDR ready. my source is a PS4 Pro. PS4Pro goes to Ligawo 4k60Hz HDR splitter. One output goes to my 4k HDR TV (here I get 4k HDR trough the splitter). The other output goes to the linker and then to my raspberry for control the LEDs. But it seems like the raspberry does not get any video. I put the second output directly to another HDMI port at my TV, and here I get 1080p (simultanously to 4k HDR at the other port). So the Linker… Read more »


Hi Chewie, any news about connecting lightberry without hd grabber with only the hdfury linker?


Is it possible yet to have lightberry work with HDR content? I’m seeing this as a bit of a problem that is stopping me from diving in. The issue would seem to be that the HDR content @4k needs in someway to be downsampled first. I have not seen a single example of 4k + HDR working with hyperion / lightberry….. any pointers chewie?


Hi guys super confused by this please can someone clarify? So the linker will downscale the 4k image to a 1080p image? So what is the point? Im currently using my lightberry 4k box with my ps4, nvidia shield etc set to 1080p output and this works no problem, The second I change anything to 4K resolution I get the HDCP error and can only run 4k content if I bypass the hdcp 1.4 lightberry box. Why would I spend £180 to run my gear in 4k mode through the lightberry box for the linker to just downscale it to… Read more »