If you don’t require CEC to be working on your Vero the full proof way to sort it would be to physically disable the connection to that device either by purchasing and installing a “CEC less adapter” or with some other method you find by googling “cec disable pin 13”. I’ve taken HDMI cables and just used a small blade to push in that one pin to make a cable that omits CEC.
Ok, do you by chance know if this works if I add the adapter on the HDMI side that goes into the Vero 4K? Or does it have to be connected to the HDMI part going into my receiver? The reason why I ask is because there is little room at the back of my unit for the HDMI cable and if I need to connect the adapter there it is going to or not fit, or it will be really tight (bent).
Otherwise I would have to try and cover it myself.
If your using a CEC less adapter it doesn’t matter which end of the cable it is connected to. It is literally just a male to female passthrough plug that purposely isn’t connecting pin 13 which is the single wire that all CEC communications are sent through.
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Sounds similar to my issue. In the end I bought a remote power socket so I power down the Vero 4k+ when not in use.
It is a known issue/limitation that if you remove power from a Vero 4k but leave the HDMI cable connected it stops CEC communication for other connected devices. This is a bit confusing to me that you’re saying you found a fix in something that is expected to be the opposite.
I didn’t know that. I had so many problems with my amp and tv switching eachother on and off when I didn’t want them to and the amp not autoswitching to the correct input (nearly all my posts on this forum). All problems happened after introducing the vero. Now I switch the vero mains off when not in use and everything works as expected/wanted. I must have been using it this way for over a year, maybe two.
Thank you for this, it works like a charm.
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It’s really interesting that that solution works.
I had always suspected that it was a grounding issue, not necessarily the Vero’s fault, and even when the power has been off it still impedes other devices as long as the HDMI is still plugged in.
There are so many variables it’s almost impossible to narrow it down in any given situation and even if you did it would likely be different for others.
Some device in the system, could be the Vero or could be something else, is likely not grounding in the same manner as other devices in the system.
That is what I suspect is most likely happening to most people.
And most people will still have problem even with the Vero off and unplugging the HDMI is the only thing that breaks everything else free.
Because of my curiosity and what you have mentioned, I think I’m going to test some things out that may be helpful to others.
I have a remote outlet I can test with to cut power to the Vero, but I’m not confident how well they cut power.
There’s usually still some phantom power leaking through.
This can easily be confirmed with a low wattage, think one watt, night light.
Plug the night light into the switchable outlet and turn it off and see if the nigh light still gives some light.
On one of mine I know it still does.
It’s less than normal operation, but it’s still faintly lit up and only visible in the dark.
Hopefully I find some helpful information in my testing.
Took me a while to get my Vero setup to hog the HDMI again.
But unfortunately my testing hasn’t proved anything worth while.
If I tell the Vero to power down then the rest of my devices have no issues with CEC.
I had no need to unplug the power to regain CEC for the rest of the system.
I toggled the power with my remote outlet just to see if the Vero would hog the CEC again when it boots back up and it did as expected.
I know people get stuck with grounding but I just can’t get my set up to do it.
I have a specific setup with certain CEC and screensaver settings that keep the Vero from being a cause for CEC issues in my setup and I have posted those settings and people have had success with them as well.
For those who could care less about CEC, then the best fix is to physically remove it with a modified HDMI cable or a CEC-less adaptor.
For those who want to use CEC the only thing I’ve known to work is my CEC/screensaver settings.
Can confirm. Same issue, same fix.
My setup : Panasonic 55FZ800 TV (HDMI2 ARC port) <> Marantz NR1509 AVR (HDMI TV ARC port) <> Vero 4K (OSMC 2024.04-1, CEC adapter disabled)
If I power off the Vero from OSMC, keep the HDMI and power supply connected, then ARC/eARC fails : the TV is still set up to send audio to the AVR and volume control of the AVR from the TV remote works but no sound goes to the AVR.
Whatever zillions steps are taken to power reset the TV/AVR, unplug HDMI from the TV/AVR, disable/re-enable CEC on both all in different order and different wait times between operations… it won’t work.
Once I remove the Vero 4K power supply ARC/eARC works again.
Cannot recall having an issue when using the OSMC suspend instead of power off.
Something not helping to diagnose is that you cannot tell if it’s suspended or powered off with the LED, as it is static red on both states.
This workaround never worked for me. LIke others I’m running really old OSMC_TGT_vero3_20230831.img which works great. No point upgrading to Vero 5 with this issue ongoing. @sam_nazarko
This issue is not present on Vero V. Unfortunately as I can’t reproduce the remaining problems I have struggled to fix it, but we have almost all set ups working as expected. The other option would have been to end Vero 4K / 4K+ support earlier, but this isn’t ideal. Those that experience issues can use an older version.
The CEC stack significantly changed when updating to the latest AMLogic kernel.
For 99.9% of users this bought an extra couple of years of support. I am still happy to look in to this but will need some more information.
I can see you reported an issue in January 2023 but report that it’s fixed in the August 2023 image. That is new information to me as we last discussed it in September 2023.
If it’s the case that the August 2023 image works as expected I can take a look. I’m not sure which workaround you’ve tried: if you can elaborate that would be appreciated.
CEC has been actively worked on and improvements have been reported: HDMI-CEC seems to stop working after a couple of hours - #343 by danmed
As you can imagine, this makes things even more confusing for me.
Hi Sam,
Just to remind ourselves the very first post here describes the problem well. Many of us with this issue have disabled CEC or run an old image. I’m running OSMC_TGT_vero3_20220314.img.gz
I can provide you SSH access if it will help and can change firmware.
The workaround mentioned that didn’t work for me (others have said it worked for them) can be found HDR Autoswitch causing issues on my LG OLED65C8 - #239 by kaspik
Please to hear you don’t think Vero5 has the issue.
Sorry – I’m confused. In your previous post you said you were using the August 2023 release. Can you clarify?
Sorry for confusion I’m running March 2022. Kodi.log “Kodi compiled 2022-03-08 by GCC 8.3.0 for Linux ARM 32-bit version 4.19.152 (267160)”
OK, that’s an older version that pre-dates the CEC changes that came with the 4.9.269 kernel.
Do you have a USB stick spare?
I’m thinking the best way to work on this would be to have you boot OSMC off a USB. This will let you switch back to the working setup promptly without too much disturbance.
Sam, I can do anything to help you with this. I didn’t know you could boot off an alternative image, sounds great.
It’s something we do when testing builds with a lot of iterations and we offered this to users when developing the 4.9 kernel in its early stages (2020).
But this is assuming the kernel is at fault (I suspect it is) and not Kodi because the Kodi version didn’t change (to my knowledge) between eARC working and it not working. If you could verify this it would be useful.
I’m not guaranteeing I can fix it however. Initially I thought we could; but given the time elapsed and the work we have done on CEC, it is evident that it is a very complex scenario and only affects specific environments. Vero 4K has been supported for 8 years by the time we end support, and we made a commitment of 5. If we had ended support after 5 you wouldn’t have experienced this issue but a large number of unaffected users would’ve lost out on three years of extra updates.
Obviously would like to try and get this fixed properly before Vero 4K/4K+ reach EOL.