Screen goes blank when playing 4K HEVC after April Update

Help and Support
1

Just updated to the April update. Had to replace Aeon Nox skin which it said was incompatible. I am now using Aeon Nox Silvo. Also use Emby for Kodi for database management.

When attempting to play a 4K HDR file with HEVC encoding, the small circles in the center of the screen spin for a second or two then the screen goes black. After another couple of seconds a notice comes up on the TV screen that the signal has been lost. No audio is heard. It remains this way until I press “stop”, at which point the screen returns and I am staring back at the poster wall.

This does not occur on h.264 or mpeg files. They play normally.

I have tried rebooting several times, to no avail. As an aside, the info reported on the screen for aspect ratio, appears to be incorrect in a number of cases. No idea if it is related or not.

logs at https://paste.osmc.tv/adudefapor

Let me know if I’ve left something out of the logs or you need more info. Thanks in advance for your help.

2

I’m guessing these are 1080p and the problem is only with 4k video.

Please try setting 422 output in settings-system-display.

3

Thanks Graham. Appreciate the quick response. That appears to have resolved the issue.

For the benefit of others out there, I have a Sony 65-A1E. Did not need to force 422 output on the previous version but apparently do now. I have all available resolutions/framerates whitelisted.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the feedback.

5

You may wish to disable mode whitelisting (as is default) unless you have a specific need for it

6

Thanks Sam. Indeed using the whitelist caused the issue that requires “force 422” output to be set. When I remove the whitelist, forcing 422 was no longer required and the file played fine.

I assumed (perhaps mistakenly) that the resolutions that appeared in the whitelist were all ones the TV was capable of displaying. In addition, I wanted 480p resolutions to be available as well so that the TV would upscale them. If I do not use the whitelist, how are 480p files output by the Vero?

1 Like
7

They will then be output as 1080p.

8

Now there’s something worth knowing! (and investigating in due course).

Edit: don’t know how 422 could have fixed this but this doesn’t look too clever:

2019-04-22 08:46:31.891 T:3454448352  NOTICE: Whitelist search for: width: 3840, height: 2160, fps: 23.976, 3D: false
2019-04-22 08:46:31.891 T:3454448352   DEBUG: Trying to find exact refresh rate
2019-04-22 08:46:31.891 T:3454448352   DEBUG: Matched exact whitelisted Resolution 4096x2160 @ 23.98 - Full Screen (38)
2019-04-22 08:46:31.891 T:3454448352  NOTICE: Display resolution ADJUST : 4096x2160 @ 23.98 - Full Screen (38) (weight: 0.000)
9

How do you do this? The whitelist screen has no toggle/radio buttons to identify which entries are selected and which ones are not (at least in the Estuary skin). This goes against the GUI design principles for all the other elements for configuring Kodi. If I click on an entry in the whitelist, what should I expect to see? I can barely tell the difference.

If the entries in the list are supposed to be user-selectable then there ought to be GUI elements to make that clear? Most of the GUI is solid, but this screen is a mess in my view.

10

In the OSMC skin we have made sure it’s more obvious. In Estuary, it goes greenish if selected.

Selecting any resolution appears to enable whitelisting. If none are selected, you get v17 behaviour.

11

Thanks for clarifying. So in Estuary, the most basic of design principles have been ignored, i.e. to ensure the GUI is completely consistent across screens (i.e. if toggle buttons are on one screen, then they are on all screens), and to ensure that you never design GUI elements in a way that could fail for users with variations of colour blindness. The fact that it goes greenish if selected is why I can’t see it, as I have problems with some shades of green. Hope an Estuary person reads this and considers fixing it. This is poor GUI design.

12

Better to make a ticket about it on the Kodi website, since it is their default skin.

13

This is something you should take up with the Kodi team. I agree with you that the Whitelist settings page is a mess. It looks like they came up with the idea of whitelisting, but didn’t think at all about the actual settings page.