Clipped highlights, recovers when screen dims

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

I’m experiencing clipped highlights on my Vero 4K+. Anything above 235 white clips to pure white, losing all detail in bright areas.

Setup:

  • Vero 4K+ → Onkyo TX-SR705 → BenQ W2000 projector (HDMI)

  • Also tested Vero directly to BenQ (same issue)

  • PS4 connected to same BenQ looks perfect—no clipping

What I’ve tried:

  • Kodi display settings: Limited range enabled

  • BenQ HDMI Range: Video (Limited) - also tried Auto and PC

  • Disabled all hardware acceleration in Kodi

  • Default Estuary skin

  • Sync playback to display: off

  • Bypassed the Onkyo entirely (no change)

  • Resolution whitelist settings are correct

Key observations:

  1. When Kodi dims the screen (inactivity/screensaver), the crushed highlights recover and I can see detail in bright areas. As soon as the screen returns to normal brightness, highlights crush again.

  2. Using AVS HD 709 test patterns, I found that lowering the per-video brightness from 50 to 16 brings back all test bars from 235-254. However, this severely crushes blacks—so I’m trading one problem for another.

  3. Adjusting contrast alone doesn’t fix it without affecting the other end of the range.

Conclusion:

This suggests the Vero 4K+ is outputting video with an incorrect gamma curve or level mapping—the signal appears to be expanded or shifted incorrectly. I shouldn’t need to drop brightness by 34 points to get correct white levels. It used to be OK, this is a fairly recent development.

Questions:

  1. Is there a known fix for incorrect output levels on the Vero 4K+?

  2. Is there a way to force correct limited range output via SSH?

2

This is unexpected. Can you post debug logs, please?

3

The log files are too large to upload at 29MB. Which ones do you need?

Or here’s the full file

4

Something odd happened at 6am today and there are thousands of warnings printed. Was your NAS offline perhaps?

I can’t see anything amiss in those logs. You have set limited range correctly, but to confirm, what is the output of cat /sys/module/am_vecm/parameters/range_control when playing a video? When do you think this happened? As you know, we are not updating OSMC software on Vero 4k/+ now.

BTW, why have you set YUV422 output? If anything, 444 should be better quality.

5

Backup location ran out of space, I think that’s what the warnings are for.

range_control simply returns “0” I don’t recall when this happened, it’s been a few months since I used my Kodi. Yes, I know Vero V is out, still on the fence with it since 4K+ has been working alright until recently.

Turned off force YUV422, that was left on from testing earlier, thanks!

6

That’s what it should be. Limited range.