Occasional black screen on Vero 4k

Had a Vero 4k for a while and recently have been getting the occasional black screen while watching stuff. Never in the GUI. Its intermittent happens on all types of content and isn’t predictable.

I have had the debug log on for a couple of days waiting for it to happen so I can see if there is anything in there. I wasn’t at home last night but my wife was watching a TV show when it happened.

I’ve just grabbed the logs (tried using the uploader in OSMC but it wasn’t working properly) to see if I could identify anything in there that might be the issue - but can’t see anything.

Given the logging has been going for days the log is massive! But I have truncated it to just when the file was playing and uploaded both here:

https://we.tl/t-AfGwx6Bc7T

My wife told me it happened around 13 minutes in. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help troubleshoot this.

Try rebooting and enabling debug logging, then uploading via My OSMC

Debug logging was enabled in those logs? I tried uploading via My OSMC but the URL that was returned just had as the result.

I grabbed the logs from the Vero 4K through Filezilla.

Complete system logs would be useful here

Sam

Just wanted to check do you want the logs when the black screen happens or just restart and send the logs as they are?

Let’s start with how they are so we can confirm your configuration.

https://paste.osmc.tv/akezapecuf

Show mediainfo of the mkvs i suspect it is a variable framerate? Had the same issues at some WEBRips.

Had this happen again, however I have managed to find a time when it is repeatable which should hopefully help debug the issue.

https://paste.osmc.tv/huqipogohi

I also have a video of it happening - I rewound the video after it happens to show that it isn’t an issue with the video at that specific point.

I’ve had a look at the logs, but there is a lot of noise in there and I am not 100% sure what I am looking for!

I disabled all of my plugins (which were clogging up the logs) and have got a much cleaner version of the log now with the issue happening:

https://paste.osmc.tv/iyutixuruw

You seem to be playing a TV show re-encoded to 24fps (25,30,50 or 60 expected). Did you make it yourself?

I did not.

@pummra:

I’ve a similiar issue here with a Vero4k. It seems to be reproducable whenever I power on my AVR and then wait 3-4 minutes (or start a playback). The effect here is that I get a blank screen for 2-3 seconds but also audio is dead in that short time interval.

Like you I have an Sony AVR in between the Vero and the TV (mine is a Panasonic plasma). The AVR model is a STR-DN1080.

Not sure whether this depends on the AVR or is a general issue with the Vero. Others are welcome with ideas how to troubleshoot.

Does it play if you turn off Adjust refresh rate and set the GUI to 1080p24 or 1080p23.9?

You could also try without the AVR in the chain to see if it’s similar to @JimKnopf’s issue.

Set the GUI to 1080p24 and turned off adjust refresh rate and it played through without the blank screen (although I could swear it stopped for a frame or too!).

Uploaded a log again:

https://paste.osmc.tv/esitoqeyil

However with adjust refresh rate off - if I play any 4k files they wouldn’t be rendered at full resolution correct?

Turning adjust refresh rate off was just for testing. Did you try 23.98Hz?

The bottom line is your file is tagged as 24fps but it’s actually 23.98fps. I’m not sure if we reckon to detect that and adjust accordingly. Try adding 1080p23.98Hz to your whitelist (and all the 4k resolutions you want) and turning adjust refresh rate back on.

Failing that, try changing the metadata in the file with a mkv editor.

1 Like

Just set up the whitelist as suggested. The same thing still happens:

https://paste.osmv.tv/oqasanelol

Will look in to see if there is a way I can get something to scan my media and update any mismatches like this.

although using MediaInfo to look at the metadata and it says it is 23.97 in there:

General
Unique ID                                : 173147157403667290602868707403596010638 (0x8242EDF536E502A69CD43DA0B27F948E)
Complete name                            : /Volumes/TV Shows/Parks and Recreation/Season 07/S07E06 - Save JJ's (1080p WEB-DL).mkv
Format                                   : Matroska
Format version                           : Version 4
File size                                : 876 MiB
Duration                                 : 21 min 30 s
Overall bit rate                         : 5 691 kb/s
Encoded date                             : UTC 2015-01-28 22:05:36
Writing application                      : mkvmerge v7.5.0 ('Glass Culture') 64bit built on Jan  4 2015 16:48:44
Writing library                          : libebml v1.3.1 + libmatroska v1.4.2

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4
Format settings                          : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames        : 4 frames
Codec ID                                 : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration                                 : 21 min 30 s
Bit rate                                 : 5 305 kb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 23.976 FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.107
Stream size                              : 816 MiB (93%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No
Color range                              : Limited
Color primaries                          : BT.709
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.709
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.709

Audio
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : AC-3
Format/Info                              : Audio Coding 3
Commercial name                          : Dolby Digital
Codec ID                                 : A_AC3
Duration                                 : 21 min 30 s
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 384 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 6 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Stream size                              : 59.1 MiB (7%)
Language                                 : English
Service kind                             : Complete Main
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No

Text
ID                                       : 3
Format                                   : UTF-8
Codec ID                                 : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info                            : UTF-8 Plain Text
Duration                                 : 21 min 21 s
Bit rate                                 : 116 b/s
Count of elements                        : 588
Stream size                              : 18.3 KiB (0%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No

Hmmm. I’m just going on this, which would read 23.98 if ffmpeg thought it was 23.98:

2019-08-16 09:58:30.410 T:3645895392 INFO: ffmpeg[D94FF2E0]: Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p(tv, bt709, progressive), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 24 fps, 24 tbr, 1k tbn, 2k tbc (default)

Mediainfo doesn’t necessarily report the metadata. It’s probably loking at some timestamps and would be finding frames 41.71 ms long like in your log:

DEBUG: CPtsTracker: detected pattern of length 1: 41708.33, frameduration: 41708.333333

Ok, so just edited the frame duration in the MKV metadata to match 23.98 fps and played through the section it normally blanked out fine:

https://paste.osmc.tv/ivukuquxof

Is there any other solution barring editing each file? I haven’t been able to find any tools which could scan my library and make these updates on a case by case basis.

I suspect you would need to write a custom script for that.