Greetings to all! New Vero 4K+ owner hoping for some assistance!
Setup is Vero 4K+ → Marantz SR5012 receiver → Samsung Q8FN, all connected via HDMI. Cables are Twisted Veins HDMI 2.0 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014EV0G3G/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1). Server is a Plex Media Server running on a Dell R620 with dual hex-core 3.0Ghz Xeon CPU’s, 128GB RAM, and 40TB of SAS RAID direct attached storage. Network is wired gigabit going through a 48-port Cisco switch. PMS runs on Windows Server 2016 64-bit.
When viewing 4K content the audio will occasionally drop out for about 1-2 seconds. This happens randomly and infrequently but usually during loud sequences (action movie explosions, for example). Audio is always DTS-HD or TrueHD. It might happen once or twice in the average two hour movie.
The problem was far worse when I had the Vero doing bitstream passthrough to the Marantz. Movies were unwatchable with constant dropouts of audio and sometimes even video. I switched the Vero to transcode to PCM, fixing the video issue entirely but the audio still occasionally drops out. I also had occasional audio “pops” until I enabled the “Lock HDMI HPD” option in Kodi’s setup. These pops were especially bad when playing YouTube videos through the Vero using the YouTube addon but that went away after locking the HDMI HPD.
I’m at a loss to explain what’s going on here. Normally I’d suspect the cables but these are brand new good quality cables rated to pass 4K @ 60Hz. I have several other sources attached to the Marantz with the same brand/type cables and none exhibit this behavior. All the gear in my setup is fully rated for 4K@60Hz.
I’ve noticed audio drop out recently with Incredibles 2 with true HD audio track. My Vero 4K+ is connected directly through YSP4300 sound bar via Hdfury Vertex that split audio from video. I’ll keep this thing monitored, enabling debug and marking somewhat the time of these events.
Could you try that locking HPD trick? Your log here https://paste.osmc.tv/doyajuyuhu shows a succession of hpd events (7 in 40 seconds) which I can’t explain.
It’s a Marantz SR5012. As for logs, I’m not using OSMC. I use Plex for Kodi since my server is Plex Media Server.
Given the above, would the Kodi logs show what you’re looking for? I wanted to check the logs myself but was unsure how to get them. I strongly suspect there’s something going on with an unstable HDMI connection but I don’t have enough evidence to prove it or suggest where in the chain such instability might lie.
Forgive my inexperience on this but where is the “My OSMC” you’re referring to? Is it in the OSMC add-on?
Prior to now I’ve either used Plex Media Player on RPi’s and ODroid C2’s or Kodi (with Plex for Kodi) on Rockchip’s PINE64. OSMC is mostly unknown to me.
Its the 4th thing on the main screen under Videos, music and pictures you can’t really miss it.
Its like a control center where you can upload logs and update the Os
Well you didn’t enable “debug logging” therefore I assume the helpfulness of the log for the team is limited.
Also it might help if you could give the rough time at which you encounter the dropouts.
Finally it seems that you have not enabled passthrough for the audio, see below for respctive setup
I’ll see about enabling debug logging as soon as I find it. Time of the dropouts is difficult but I’ll note it next time I play a movie (tomorrow). Regarding passthrough, that causes almost constant dropouts even though it shouldn’t which is why it’s disabled at the moment.
Digging through the logs I spotted tons of the following:
See how the same sequence keeps repeating over and over? Although I can’t correlate this exactly to the dropouts, the timing DOES seem to be about right.
Yup. First things I tried. I even tried different receivers (Pioneer Elite vs. Marantz). No difference. My gut tells me it’s some kind of HDMI signalling issue. If this was Ethernet I’d be doing packet captures by now for analysis but, alas, no way I know to do that with HDMI. Hopefully the logs will show the culprit.
The other weird thing is its ONLY the audio, not the video. No video corruption, dropouts, freezes, or any of that when the audio drops. Given that the video stream is far more demanding than the audio, I’d expect the video would show issues at least as frequently as the audio if not more but that’s not what’s happening.
I suppose it could be a bad HDMI port on the Vero 4K+ but I’ve no way to test that theory. None of my other devices on the receiver exhibit this issue so it’s specific to the Vero. However the other devices are gaming consoles (PS3, PS4 Pro, Xbox One S) which don’t get near the usage the Vero does.
About my configuration, I don’t use Plex and I’ve heard that audio dropout few times with The Incredibles 2 and TrueHD audio track…I’ve also seen many movies with TrueHD and I’ve never heard any audio dropout before that…maybe it’s something related with some recent update…maybe not. I’ll let you know know: I’m in the middle of that movie, I need to complete the watch in the very next days
It’s only on 4K movies. It never happens on HD or SD clips. All my movies are ripped with lossless audio (DTS-HD or TrueHD) whenever possible.
Also, I’m not using passthrough. I tried that initially and the result was constant audio AND video dropouts every few seconds. Switching to transcoding everything to PCM made the problem seem to go away so I left it that way despite that it should not have been necessary.
The problem exists not only on my Marantz but also my Pioneer unfortunately.