The last 2 months or so I’ve been getting random black screen hangs when initiating playback. The Vero V is responsive, I press play and it appears to be playing, but I just get a black screen and nothing happens. If I look at the web GUI it appears to be playing. If I hit stop it will return to the KODI interface and if I do a restart, evertyhing works fine.
I can’t seem to repeat it reliable and it’s happened about a dozen times in the last 2 months. I’m only watching the Vero V mostly on weekends, so I’m not sure if this is something that occurs after a period of inactivity or not. Hard to capture a log on this since I can’t reliably reproduce. Normally I’d think this is a connection failure between the Vero V and my NAS (which is where all media is stored and shared by NFS mounts). However, when that failure happens (due to a router reboot and the NFS mount failing) I usually see the blue loading graphic and it hangs there…not on black screen?
I get the feeling this emerged for me after the November 2025 update (which is what I’m still on as it doesn’t seem a new update has been released in 2026). This is not a major as it doesn’t happen all the time and rebooting the Vero V immediately resolves it.
Can you upload a log when this happens, it should give us some clues regarding what’s going on.
If OSMC is hanging on boot, then it could be indicative of a network failure.
Do you have fstab / autofs mounts?
Are you using a MySQL database?
Can you show us a photo of the OSMC screen? If it’s the standard OSMC splash screen, then something is delaying a Kodi start. If it’s a sad face, something is crashing Kodi.
I’m using the Estuary skin and there is no issue when starting OSMC. It boots/reboots and starts cleanly. No hangs. I use fstab to automount two volumes. The main library being hosted via NFS on a Synology NAS.
The issue surfaces intermittently when I go to play a Movie or TV show from the library.
Since this is issue is intermittent and a reboot makes it go away, what’s the best way to grab a log when it happens? Put it into debug mode and then try to repeat the failure and upload the log then? It is often occurring many days after rebooting and I know the preferred option is to go to debug mode, reboot and then try to replicate the problem specifically….but rebooting is what clears the issue.
Maybe there is something I can inspect via ssh in real-time when it’s happening before I do a restart?
Again, no issue on startup or restarting. It’s simply that I intermittently get a black screen when starting a video. Stop command still responds and returns to the KODI interface and I can execute a reboot. No sign of Kodi crashing.
Also, when my fstab mount goes stale (for example I have rebooted the router, but no Kodi) I usually see the blue wheel loading icon when trying to play a video and that tells me Kodi is running into a network issue. This looks different than that.
Hey…managed to capture it in a log I think. The log file is probably a bit big because it’s several days between restarts, but look at this time stamp and you’ll see the video that failed and generated a black screen.
2026-02-22 17:59:54.499 T:2930
I also was able to play a movie just after that failure (pressing STOP stops the black screen and returns to Kodi) and it didn’t black screen. Going back to the same video after getting the movie to play still yielded the failure. So it’s not a network issue I would say. Tried another TV episode as well and it played ok, so maybe it’s some kind of codec specific issue?
Thanks @sam_nazarko been busy so haven’t had a lot of testing time. I think I successfully removed all the whitelist settings and changed Adjust Refresh Rate to Always and it feels like it improved, but then I had another failure last night.
I manually pasted kodi.old.log into the omsc paste as follows - hopefully that’s ok?
It simply looks like kodi/mediacenter was shut down. It’s a pity that you did not upload a full debug log set. Let us know if you need instructions … but you’re long enough here in the forum to know what we want to see.
hi @JimKnopf - yeah, sorry about that. The problem is hard to replicate. It seems I have to wait many hours after rebooting to replicate the issue. I should have turned on debug logging before I rebooted and tried to regenerate the glitch, but the family wanted to watch a movie and not me doing diagnostics
I saw some decoder failures in that log that I uploaded at the around the 2026-04-25 22:08:27.510 timestamp that I thought might be meaningful.
I had to wait until today to try and replicate it, but again, all I can do is turn debug logging on and then replicate the error. If I turn on debug logging and reboot, the problem can’t be reproduced.
So maybe this log will be more useful to you or @sam_nazarko
Hi @JimKnopf@sam_nazarko - ok I’ve finally had spare time to do the full debug logging thing and replicate the issue. I enabled debug logging, rebooted this morning, came back this evening from work and tested one of the problematic files again and it issued the black screen. I stopped the video and tried another 1080p encode and it played fine, tried a DV encoded 4K file and it worked, then the same file failed.
Rebooting the Vero let the file play perfectly. Comparing the video files this one that causes the issue is not DV, but does have DTS-HD MA +DTS:X. I wonder if that has something to do with it?
HEVC Main 10, HDR10-compatible, 3840×1600, 23.976 fps, BT.2020/PQ, with HDR10 static metadata. The audio is DTS-HD MA + DTS:X.
here’ the debug log if you have time to look at it
note: I tried tweaking lots of different settings to see if anything would affect it and nothing has so if you notice something unusual in the settings such as Lock HDMI HPD: true, that has no bearing on it and wast just me trying various things to see if it would help.
I cannot see something unusual. The timezone is for us confusing since NZST and Pacific/Auckland is UTC+12.
The active kodi log timestamps jumps back from 2026-05-12 09:27:25.999 to 2026-05-11 21:27:26.001 but this is more a cosmetic issue, I think.
Others (and @moderators) are welcome to have a look into this. In the active kodi log
2026-05-12 08:38:40.082 T:2922 info <general>: VideoPlayer::OpenFile: /home/osmc/mnt/9tb/Movies/Harry.Potter.and.the.Deathly.Hallows.Part.2.2011.mkv
and
2026-05-12 08:39:52.584 T:2922 info <general>: VideoPlayer::OpenFile: /home/osmc/mnt/9tb/Movies/Harry.Potter.and.the.Deathly.Hallows.Part.2.2011.mkv
seem to match system journal timestamps around
May 12 20:38:40
and
May 12 20:39:52.
The VeroV is connect to a Sony device (AVR?) at port 4 and this device is connected to the TV sink (unknown brand/model and caps) at port 2.
I’ve been doing further testing and it seems like forcing 4:2:2 resolves this issue? I have never enabled that in the past, but that does sort it out immediately. Also, it does seem really tied to DTS HD MA files?
For clarity, this is an LG OLED C2 and using a STR-DN1080 with high quality high-speed hdmi 2.1b compatible hdmi cables.
I’m also using a Sony STR-DN1080 (I’m absolute satisfied except the support of HDR10+ which forces me for OSMC tests to connect a second VeroV and BD-player directly to the TV Philips OLED910).
In my environment I’m using hdmi ultra high speed cables, only. The symptoms you describe somehow sounds like a bandwidth issue in the hdmi chain from VeroV till the LG TV or even an issue with the TV itself. But nothing we can figure out with the OSMC log data atm. In another case I’ve seen in OSMC journal logs some messages pointing to a connection/bandwidth issue but this will only cover the first hdmi segement from the Vero to the first hdmi device in the path.
yeah I have 48gbps 2.1 compatible ultra’s in the whole chain and it was never an issue until sometime in the last few months and there has been no cable changes, hardware changes, I haven’t even shuffled the TV cabient around. And again, it’s so strange to me that a reboot immediately resolves the issue. I chucked the logs at ChatGPT and asked it to look for any issues and it sent me down the HDMI HPD lock settings and suggested something is causing an HDMI handshake issue after a period of time, but all of it’s crazy work arounds didn’t make a difference.
Is there a downside to forcing 4:2:2 subsampling in my Vero V→STR-DN1080→LG C2? I can’t really tell an obvious quality difference in playback with that turned on or off.
I suppose I could try swapping out some of the cables…but I don’t really think of HDMI cables just ‘failing’ spontaneously and I wouldn’t think it could be immediately resolved by rebooting the Vero.
Chroma subsampling is explained here.
With 4:2:2 you save 1/3 of the bandwidth you need with 4:4:4 on costs of halfen the horizontal colour resolution. If you don’t see any difference, fine.
The 4:2:2 subsampling in the settings has an extra notice mentioning LG TVs; I don’t know what the (historical) background is. Perhaps, @grahamh or @sam_nazarko can shed some light here.
