With all due respect, I feel that you guys are jumping to conclusions a little too fast.
I have now tested about 8 cables, including the one shipped with the Vero, the one shipped with the Vizio TV, and a variety of good quality cables varying from $3 to $180.
Specifically this last test was done connecting the Vero directly to the TV (no Denon receiver in the middle) with a brand new Monoprice Premium certified cable 3ft (1m) long. As you guys know Monoprice is one of the most common and reliable HDMI cables provider in US. All cables are individually tested at 18gbps, come with the HDMI premium certified sticker, etc…
I still have playback problems, so saying that the Vero has no issues is a little premature, in my opinion.
Having said that I’m happy to pay for any cable that would solve my problem, even if it is just a short one for testing purposes.
So far we have scientifically debunked the long length of the cable (short cables still fail), the Denon receiver (direct connection Vero<–>TV still fails), so if you guys think that I’m so unlucky that all my cables are not good enough, I’m open to suggestions.
Please turn off the HDR auto-switching option and confirm if you have a problem. If you don’t, then try enabling 10-bit output via the command line. If you then have issues after enabling via the command line, then it suggests the culprit may be in the cable.
The HDR autoswitch option is experimental; but shouldn’t cause a loss of display.
You definitely shouldn’t have rc.local changes and HDR auto-switching enabled. This will cause problems.
Cool. I can’t tell you for sure that in 8 bit mode (no autoswitch and no rc.local mod) everything is fine.
I tried the autoswitch, but it was triggering only a fraction of the times, confounding my test results (sometimes I thought everything was fine, but then I realized that I was actually watching 8 bits with evident banding), so I did the rc.local mod, and I guess I left ALSO the autoswitch on without thinking about it.
I’ll disable autoswitch and stay with the rc.local mod only and see how it goes.
there hasn’t been much movement on this thread, so I’m just summarizing where I am, for future reference.
Short story:
The problem is still there.
It has nothing to do with the Denon receiver, because I proved that the problem persists even if the Vero is connected directly to the TV with a 1m certified high speed cable.
I also don’t believe it is cable issue, because I tried many many cables (all 18gbps cables) and the result is always the same.
So it is either a software issue or a hardware marginality in either the Vero or the TV (Vizio P75-C1). Which one of these, I cannot say. I know that suspecting the cable was the most logical thing to do, but the evidence went another way.
I’m just living with this for now. When the problem appears, I usually just reboot a couple of times and things start to work again. Annoying for sure, but in the big scheme of things, it is not a huge deal.
In my opinion as more people enable 444 10 bits in the next few months, we will see more of this issue and maybe it will be possible to debug it. We already have 3-4 people in this thread and another user contacted me with a private message.
When I have some free time I’ll test if my old Shield was any better. Of course the Shield had many more issues with colorspace and audio passthrough, so I have no regrets in having moved to OSMC.
Interesting situation. I had my room wired a couple of years with a 50-foot Monoprice Redmere Active HDMI cable 4K/18gbps, - to “future proof” the room. I finally upgraded a few days ago to 4K, and I was getting very inconsistent video from my Denon 4300H. Short cable from Vero 4K to receiver, and then the 50ft 18gbps Monoprice HDMI to my projector (JVC DLA-RS540U). Sparklies, drop-outs, sync loss etc. Just hopeless.
I ended up getting a cable like you did - the RUIPRO fiber HDMI cable, and it works fine - 50-feet, too, in 10-bit etc.
If you’re having issues with any cable length - as you say - then the issue is likely a hardware incompatibility between the Vero and your TV, - failing that a fault with the Vero (unlikely in this case).
Do you have a buddy with a 4K TV that you could test with? Only having one display device means it’s hard to narrow anything down specifically.
yes, 8 bit always works with no issues.
for 10 bits, I haven’t seen any difference between using the auto switch option or, alternatively the rc.local mod (apart that the auto switch doesn’t always trigger).
For now, I’m just keeping the rc.local mod (disabled auto switch) and accept that every once in a while I need to reboot the system to make a movie start. I made peace with it.
I want to update this thread with good news. As of today, I’ve been problem free for over a month. I wanted to wait a good amount of time before feeling good that the problem is gone (at least for now).
In the end, the problem was not with the cable, or with the receiver, or with the Vero4k. It turned out that the problem is caused by the TV firmware. I searched in several forum and found out that Vizio, in the latest firmware, created a bug that, at times, messes up the EDID for HDR. Luckily there’s a workaround, that I found on the Vizio subreddit (enable chroma subsampling for all the HDMI inputs of the tv even the ones that are not used or do not have an HDR source, and also disable the power saving mode of the TV) and after following those instructions, I have not had a problem for weeks.
Supposedly Vizio will fix this, but for now I’m very happy with the workaround.